“So was Homer,” Mrs. Wilson said then.

“But Homer knew what was happening. He knew. Hiro didn’t. What was he supposed to think?”

“He still felt terrible,” Mrs. Wilson said. “Tak—Hiro, I mean—was his best friend.”

“This is how he treats his best friend?”

Silence now, Mrs. Wilson looking first at Mrs. Takahashi and then to my grandmother and finally to me. “I didn’t come here to be abused,” she said then.

She rose to her feet and I with her and it was me who asked her to wait, told her to. “She came all this way,” I said.

“Then she wasted her time.”

“No she didn’t,” I said. “Just wait a minute. Please.” I cannot explain why but I felt the first sharp wave of panic creeping into my heart, as if her departure from this house would have consequences detrimental to us all.

“Evelyn,” Mrs. Takahashi said from the settee. “Please don’t leave.”

“Well, you’re just . . . ,” Mrs. Wilson began, her mouth opening and closing and opening once more as she started over: “I can’t change what happened,” she said. “I just can’t.”

“I know.”

“We were all hurt by it, you know. Not just you.”

“I know that too,” Mrs. Takahashi said. “Please sit with me.”

Mrs. Wilson was reluctant but at last she did so, her frame lowering itself in a manner almost robotic, a slow fluidity that brought her back to the edge of the sofa, her hands once again together in her lap.

“Will you help me?” Mrs. Takahashi said then.

“With what, Kim?”

“To find out what happened to my boy.”

“Oh,” Mrs. Wilson said. “Is that why you came?”

“Yes,” she said. “That is why I came.”

THE LETTERS SENT TO THEM in the camp were addressed to Hiroshi Takahashi, small envelopes containing a single sheet of plain white paper scribbled over in Homer’s blocky script and filled with misspellings and awkward untutored phrasings that sometimes passed so close to humor that Hiro would often laugh as he read them, realizing, perhaps for the first time, that his own English was better than that of his American friend. Hiro would read the words once or twice in silence while the rest of them waited, the girls with increasing impatience (although the letters rarely included anything of interest to them at all), Ray with some measure of despondency, and Kimiko simply watching her husband’s expression, the change between concentration and amusement and confusion that passed over his features like low clouds over the saltbush and sandy loam.

Hiro would then pass the letter to his eldest for reading aloud and Ray, already standing, would do so carefully, in a voice just loud enough for them all to hear, although of course they knew that the Hosokawas were very likely listening from the other side of the wall that incompletely divided their living quarters from that of their neighbors.