“I’m sorry,” Milton said. “It’s none of my business.”

“No,” she replied. “It’s not.”

There was a fresh steel to her tone that took Milton by surprise. She stared at her hands clasped in her lap. Milton was wondering whether he should apologise again when Amber arrived with their meals.

“Thank you,” Sakura said as the woman put a china plate down on her table and fussed with the cutlery. “That smells lovely.”

She waited for Amber to leave before she looked over the divider at Milton again.

“It’s I who should say sorry. My husband—Miyasato—died not that long ago. It’s still…” Her voice trailed off, and she cleared her throat before continuing. “It’s still very difficult to talk about it, and I wasn’t expecting your question.”

She met his eyes; Milton saw that they were damp. She looked away and there was another moment of silence. Milton could see that the memory of her loss was still raw, and, rather than probe any deeper, he changed the subject.

“So, what do you do now that you don’t fly?”

She took a sip of her refilled champagne. “I’m an executive for an import-export company in Tokyo. They’re always looking for new markets, and they send me to find them. Istanbul looks interesting, so I’ve been digging around there for the last week.”

“And Bali?”

“The same. They export a lot of rice. I have a meeting with a producer to see whether we can agree to a deal to bring some of it to Japan.”

She said it with an expectant face, almost as if she was asking him for approval for what she did. He smiled at her. This was turning out to be an unexpected journey. He relaxed in his seat. It wasn’t all that long ago that he had been sitting in economy, concerned about the child who he knew was going to cry, and irritated with the lecherous boor in front of him. Now he was sitting in a first-class suite, next to a beautiful woman who seemed—for reasons he couldn’t quite fathom—to have taken an interest in him.

10

Sakura poked at her chicken with her fork, moving it around the plate. It wasn’t that she wasn’t hungry—she hadn’t eaten for hours—but that she was feeling a little unwell. She told herself it was just the nerves. The alternative was not worth thinking about.