“It’s been more than ten years since that awful affair.”

“Twelve years since he vanished.”

“He told you everything?”

“In a way, yes.” Hongmei smiled. “In the most impossible way.”

The girl smiled too. “He’s an impossible father.”

The woman looked pained for a moment but immediately pulled a face and smiled again.

Hongmei thought with some emotion that even with all the mystery and lies, there had been sincerity in this shared father-daughter pain after all.

“Why not publicly acknowledge your father? He could come out of hiding.”

“He only got in touch with me two months ago.”

Hongmei thought, That’s right. He had talked about reuniting with his daughter a couple of months ago. That had sounded made-up, but it actually had happened.

“We’d have to make a lot of arrangements first,” said the woman. “How to deal with the media, and my mother . . . We’ll have to plan everything thoroughly. To my father and me, this was a total catastrophe. We’re too battle-scarred to be able to defend ourselves against the media and all the public figures who’ll line up to attack us again.”

The woman’s huge, deep eyes had fine lines around them. Hongmei thought, They even wrinkle in the same way, these old-seeming eyes.

As the woman said goodbye, she said not to worry. Her father would definitely wait for Hongmei—he indulged the women he loved. The woman raised an eyebrow, trying to look cheeky, but her wounds had brought her preternatural maturity, so her expression was at odds with her face.

“You understand my father better than I do. You know how much he’ll give in to you,” she said.

“Huh. That’s not how it felt in his messages. He was always distant. Everything was a secret.” Hongmei paused, smiling a little. “He writes well, though, apart from not being able to spell the word ‘disappointed.’”

“Missing the letter a? Yeah, he always gets that wrong. Maybe there’s some special reason. You should ask him.”

Hongmei pulled the shawl around her shoulders and headed back outside. As she opened her car door, the woman smiled and waved. That smile was so familiar, it made Hongmei dizzy.

She drove through the city center. There were long lines of candles on either side of the street and people singing “Give Peace a Chance.”

A short Asian man holding a wooden sign, speaking loudly, kept flickering in and out of view in the candlelight. He was a professional protester—no matter what the cause, he’d turn up with that placard, saying the same thing, standing earnestly among the crowds. He was like the professional mourners in Hongmei’s home village, except he wasn’t getting paid. Enmities and alliances would transform, the power balance would shift, and national governments would fall—but he was eternal, unchanging.