Ha had seen Con Dao, but not seen it: it was as if the orphanage field trip had not taken place in the physical world. No. Her world had been built, that year, of pure emotion. The island was nothing but a backdrop to her feelings. The arrival here was a smear of color and sound. Voices of hawkers, the island of Hon Ba behind the swaying fishing boats—all of it meaningless in the face of her obsession. And she felt now, as she often had then, the shame of that obsession rising in her skin, burning her throat, welling into her cheeks. His indifference to her. His face turned away.

They were on the island three days, staying in Con Son Town, but when she arrived on the island this time it had not felt like a return. She’d recognized almost nothing. Like she had never been here at all: the place she had visited as a lonely teenager was warped out of recognition by the gravity of obsession. She tried to think of that place. Instead, she saw only him: his perfect face, his eyes always turned away from her. She remembered running up to him, one morning on the beach. Wet from the waves, feeling pretty in her swimsuit, trying to get him to see her. She’d thrown sand at him. He’d smiled, glanced at her the way you look at a stranger passing on the street: lazily, only vaguely interested, only vaguely wondering about them at all. Then he had turned away, with that same smile on his face.

That day at breakfast she sat at his table. He didn’t even look at her. He asked her to pass a plate of sweet basil leaves, calling her by the wrong name.

Her attention on him had warped her memories, the way the gravity of a star will warp space-time around it. He had drawn everything in toward himself. Con Dao, her teachers and caretakers, even the other students from the orphanage, were just the distorted swirl of atoms around him.

Ha remembered that younger self, so caught up in emotion, with loathing. That person was alien to her. Worse than alien, because that sixteen-year-old self was her, but at the same time was not her. Like a preconscious being. A thing that she had been.

In the orphanage, personal isolation had been as total as personal space was nonexistent. She had learned to cut herself off from others. Trust was unknown between the girls. Every possession was precious, to be defended or traded for something of equal or greater value. There was no question of alliances. Friendships were a method for exchanging another set of valuable trading commodities: bits of information. Those that could do the most damage carried the most value. The most destructive gossip could be exchanged for almost any physical object. It always accrued value.