He did not tell Kimiko for three days, writing a letter to Homer Wilson in the interim and posting it without her knowing, a simple document which was just as informal as any—we are fine, Kimiko is fine, Ray is fine, Doris and Mary are fine, letter arrived from unknown Walter E. Shettley, confusing, etc.—and dropping it at the camp’s post office and then thinking, believing, that when Homer’s reply arrived it would confirm what Hiro had decided almost immediately: that the letter had been intended for someone else, that the hakujin lawyer, unfamiliar with Japanese names, had meant it to go to a ­Takamoto or a Yamasashi, and while he could not determine what kind of error had placed his own name both on the envelope and in the letter itself he continued to believe that it had been an error. He could not stop looking at the document, unfolding it on the walks he sometimes made around the exterior of the grounds, the fence scrolling by on his left and the letter often clutched in his hand. He would occasionally nod at passersby, and some—men he knew from the camp—even asked what he was reading, what had drawn from him such an intense look of concentration. Each time he would make up some excuse or simply smile, say, “Nothing of interest,” and then ask them about their children, their wives.

He told himself that the whole of the letter had been a simple error, and yet as the days passed he could not help but wonder how such a thing could happen, how a lawyer could make a mistake that called both himself and Homer Wilson by name, an error which could not be waved away as a simple bureaucratic mistake. Then came the first warm flush of doubt, its surface as hard and rough as a peach’s stone pit. The light low in the west so that the fence’s shadow was written in a faintly wavering line against the colorless dust.

He handed her the letter that night, the children gone from the room, his wife lowering herself into one of the chairs at the table, the letter in her hand, her eyes continuing to stare at its lines of type, at the signature of the lawyer, Walter E. Shettley.

“It must be a mistake?” he said at last, the sentence curling up into a question although it was, in fact, no question at all but a kind of querulous statement of hope.

“No,” she said quietly. “No mistake.”

“But why?”

“You trusted them,” she said.

“He’s my friend.”

And now, at last, she moved, her head snapping up from the table to stare at him, eyes bright and sharp and glaring. “Your friend? Your friend?”

He nodded. “He is my friend.”

“He’s hakujin,” she said.

“He doesn’t think like you do.”

“Like I do? You think I make him hakujin? You think I do that?”