From the windows of your room, I saw you walking toward the inn, lit by the lanterns lining its front path. I hurried downstairs to greet you. By the front door, the maid was already waiting with a yukata neatly folded in her hands. A routine is in place, I noted. Her skin is pale for someone living so near to the sea. Her body is no more than fifteen. She could be Oman’s twin, I thought, as this heart became a moth beating its drab, futile wings.

When you caught sight of me, Yakumo, there was not a breath between your recognition and your elation. You sprinted toward me with the legs of a youth, not a man of forty-one. Your black hair was damp, and the cloth of your gray yukata stuck to the seawater on your body. You wrapped your arms around me and lifted me off the ground, as if offering me to the sky.

I heard the maid sucking in the salt air, astonished by the open show of your affection.

The moth flew away.

The following week we became man and wife at the Izumo Shrine. Ōkuninushi, the Shintō god of marriage, was a witness. Nishida-san was the other.

We had been together as man and woman, months before. A cloth had covered the bush warbler’s cage.

The commitment to each other came later, its rites completed by the Kitzuki letter.

The marriage ceremony came last.

For your Elizabeth’s book, I had to reverse the order of those three acts. I did it for the dead and for the living, Yakumo. What good is the truth to your legacy, the children’s future, and for the present that I must now live without you?

When the one-year anniversary of your passing had neared, the cablegrams began arriving again, breathless as before: “Mrs. Hearn, your contribution completed, I trust. Translation under way, I presume. Manuscript sent to my summer address posthaste.” Kazuo translated the words for me, his eleven-year-old’s voice reminding me that your biographer was impatient and waiting.

Elizabeth is hungry!

Elizabeth is angry!

Elizabeth has my hat!

I was determined to hold on to what was mine. I had no intention of sending anything to your Elizabeth. Foster Mother must have known, as she took me aside that night and showed me the household accounts, which she had been managing on her own. Almost a full year without your university professor salary, Yakumo, and there was not much left that this house could trim, except for the house itself.

I resolved not to be a Chie, wasting away, taking the sons of Koizumi with me. And little Suzuko, how could I ever allow her to become me?

But I still could not breathe for the two of us, Yakumo. Thus, when I began that first telling of your story, the ghost of you was here by my side, holding me by the hand.