“Quiet now,” Hiro said then. He flicked his chin in the direction of the neighbors.

“You’re a foolish man.”

“Don’t,” he said.

“I’m telling you the truth,” she said. Then she said his name. She did not say it often, using instead Otōsan, Father, to reflect his role in the family. But she said it now, “Hiro.” Then, “I know he was important to you.”

“He’s my friend.”

Her eyes went to the letter again, reading it through once more. Then she folded it back into its little square. “You should burn this,” she said.

“You think it’s true?”

“How could it not be true?”

“A mistake.”

“You know it’s not a mistake.”

For the rest of her life, she would remember how he looked in that moment, the mingling of despair and betrayal and fear passing across his features like the wind over a field of grass. How she wished she could pull him to her like she had seen in American moving pictures: two people crashing together with such power that it was as if they had become magnets drawn to each other alone. But she and Hiro did not have that kind of relationship. She did not know if anyone actually did.

“What will we do?” her husband said then.

“Find somewhere else.”

“Where?”

“We’ll find something,” she said.

“I don’t understand. I don’t understand what happened. What could have happened?”

“Money maybe.”

“He wouldn’t do that.”

“But he did. He is.”

“Why? Why is this happening?”

“Because this is not our home.”

“This isn’t forever,” he said. “This is just for now.”

“I don’t mean this place,” Kimiko said then, gesturing at the walls, the floors, the sandblasted windows, the cooking stove.

It matters little if there were more words between them; those words would have been more of the same and they would have quieted after a time and Hiro would have folded the letter once more into his pocket and wandered outside with his pipe. She insisted that he needed his solitary walk, when in fact it was she herself who needed to be alone. The fact of that letter, of Walter E. Shettley’s missive, washed over her like a wave, not its ultimate meaning—nearly three decades would pass before she truly understood what it all meant and even then her knowledge would be partial—but what it meant for her and Hiro and the children and what it might mean for Ray. She found herself seated not in the chair now but on the edge of Doris’s bed, sitting on its lumpy edge and staring forward until the gaps in the wall boards faded into a wavering texture of soft horizontal stripes beyond which was the barbed-wired fence that held all the world: a flat bare space containing only humiliation and loneliness.