And Lin, she was used to escaping, hiding, running, he knew. Both of them knew in their skin the loud explosions, the bright lights in the sky at night, the smell of cordite that stayed on clothing. Red narrow lights and smoke falling, crossing earth, the sounds at first like ghosts calling down the sky.

But love is not held back by the lines and bounds and fires of war and they found love for one another. He knows that love has always been her constant search. It is part of Lin’s cell structure. It is why she wants to find her father.

“It’s so far away. You are very brave,” he says, holding her in his sweating arms. He knows her story in the way lovers talk. “You always were.”

Even so, she keeps a light burning all night. There are nightmares. He sleeps with his narrow arm across his eyes.

So, the plan is made. Lin will fly to San Francisco. She already speaks English and several other languages. She calls it the gift she inherited from her mother. She has the gift of flowers but she is also a translator and studies the archives of the lost. She remembers the joy she felt, finding the children of the mother who was taken from beneath a tree near where she once lived. She could sit for long hours at a clean wood table, looking at papers, orderly files, talking with people who haven’t known order, who haven’t slept, who have miraculously, as she knows, survived. It is comforting there for a girl who loves organization and cleanliness. The room itself is straight lines, neat and clean, papers filed away. But she also has compassion. It has always been her nature. She expends energy finding documents, as if each one is personal to her, a search of her own, sometimes working late hours. When the occupation and then the Party came, papers were gone through, torn, used against people. Some files were scattered and missing, some wet and difficult to read. Words have great power and she knows it and now she looks for words to put together. Sometimes she sits beside a person or family who has lost everything, where she can see the speakers and the emotions on the faces of those who understand nothing being said and have no choice but to trust her. She softens the direct questions. She looks at them openly. They might not know it to look at the gentle, steady young woman, but she has seen what they have seen, the wounds, parts of bodies, fires, the lost families and villages and crying children everywhere. She was one of them. She wonders what her father thinks of her.

Thomas remembers how on the day she was born he was sent outside the blue wooden door to wait. It was a door he and her mother had found and carried from a bomb site and added to their makeshift place. He used wood and leather for hinges, replacing them often. He thinks of her mother. He’d first seen Ma wearing the pants and tunic traditional to the women in Vietnam, silk, not work clothes. Later, Ma was so gentle with him, giving him water and rice when he could not stand up. And then she was having their child on a mat, on the brushed floor of earth. His child. He sat on the ground outside and it began to rain. He thought about, of all things, love. There were those who would have killed him, but now he forgets them and thinks of love. Out there, Ruth came to his mind like someone gone, a ghost he’d once held, and later, when he opened his arms, she had disappeared. He lived in another world then. He loved her still, but he was no longer an American. The village was his place and he was happy there.