“She was. Look, I wasn’t ever going to go into all this if you were going to be gone the second you graduated, and I’m sure as fuck not here to be your Wise Asian Friend who drops the fucking ancient mystical knowledge about the beauty of family or some shit, and yes I admit bringing you here was a bit dramatic, but if Francine…Look. This whole situation is getting stupid, and I need you to really hear me.”

A carload of people pulled into the parking lot and walked to the wall, talking quietly and taking pictures.

I sat in the grass beside the water, my chest tight. Kira sat beside me.

“When the internment started, the government searched all the orphanages for Japanese kids,” she said. “If a baby had even one-eighth Japanese blood, they were taken to Manzanar, to this makeshift orphanage called Children’s Village. Something like a hundred babies and toddlers and little kids. My grandma was born with a deformed left hand, which apparently freaked out her parents, who left her at a Catholic orphanage in Oregon, and that’s where she was rounded up before her first birthday and sent to the prison camp because Japanese orphan babies were totally a threat to national security.”

“Obviously,” I said.

She smiled. “Right? My mom says a lot of Japanese adults back then considered orphans part of the Burakumin, which is like untouchable. So when the war ended, most of the orphans were either sent back to the nuns or adopted by white families. But not my grandma.”

“Why?”

She shook her head. “Don’t know. My great-grandparents’ son was still alive, fighting in the war, so it wasn’t like a mending-a-broken-heart, lost-child thing. All Grandma ever said was that Great-Grandma and Great-Grandpa saw her playing in the camp one day, chasing birds in the dirt in a fenced-off area cordoned with razor wire and they just liked her so much.”

We turned to look over our shoulders when the family at the wall laughed. They were speaking Japanese, the kids all had flowers that they placed on the narrow ledge beneath one of the embedded photographs.

“Muir,” Kira sighed. “I never wanted to be all, Oh, I understand all about adoption because some people I never really knew adopted my grandma decades before I was born. I can never know your life, I would never pretend to, but none of us can know anyone’s but our own, and I know you now. So does Sean. And Francine. And be pissed about this all you want, but we wish you would stay.”

Variation on a theme.

“Did you and Sean talk about this?”

She frowned. “About what?”

“Me. Staying.”