Will takes her hand. She looks so lost.

“Do you know my best quality? ” she asks.

“Of your many, I could not say, my darling.”

“I see the best in people. I fall in love with people when I see a window into their beings, their shining moments. I’ve fallen in love with so many people but the trouble is I fall out of love so quickly too. I see the worst in them just as easily.

“Do you know I fell in love with you right away? That day at the Trotters’ I had noted you because you were new, of course, and then you sat down at the piano, and you played a few notes, but you played them so well, with no self-consciousness, and no idea that anyone might be listening. It was in that room off the garden and you were the only one there. I was passing through on the way to the ladies’ room and saw you there. I fell in love with you right then, and so I spilled my drink all over myself so I could meet you.”

“Darling Trudy,” he says.

She stands up.

“I can’t bear it,” she says in a rush. “I just can’t.” And then she turns around and leaves. “Eat what I’ve brought you,” she calls out behind her as the door swings shut behind her with a clang. “You need to be strong.” Her voice fades as she walks away.

“Johnnie, I have to get out of here.”

He says it that night, after they have gone to bed, and he can hear his companion’s breath just deepening into sleep. It stops, then starts again.

“You do? ”

“Yes. I’m losing her.”

“I see.”

“Will you help me?”

“Of course.”

But he didn’t need to ask. Of course, Trudy had another way.

“I’ve gotten you a week’s furlough. Otsubo got me a pass that says you’re to do some work for him. Isn’t that wonderful? ”

“What kind of work am I to do?”

She looks at him as if he’s completely missed the point.

“No idea. Some kind of clerical work which you and only you, the inimitable Will Truesdale, are qualified to do. Proper accounting. Plant watering. Japanese flattering. Does it matter? You get to get out of here! Aren’t you thrilled? That’s gratitude for you!”

“What do I have to do? ”

“Are you a complete moron? Nothing!” she cries. “Absolutely nothing. I thought it would be nice for you to get out and see what’s going on outside. No one else has this kind of opportunity, you know.”

“Well, thank you,” he says. “I do appreciate it.”

“You’ll get to see what life outside is like, what my life has become.”

“Perhaps you’ll do an exchange,” he says. “Come in here for a fortnight.”

“Peut-être,” she says. She always reverts to French when she wants to change the subject.

So the next Monday, Will is waiting by the sentry’s bungalow. He has been treated rather well for the past week. Ohta came to see him with a copy of the furlough order, trying to fish some information from him.

“Otsubo has sent for you,” he had said.

“Yes,” Will nodded.

“He is head of gendarmerie.”

“Yes.”

“You have important skill? ”

“Yes.”

Ohta stood for a moment, trying to see if Will would give him anything. When he didn’t, he threw the order on the floor and said he should wait by the gate on Monday. But then Will noticed that all the guards were more polite and that he was not subject to taunts and searches anymore.

Trudy pulls up in a convertible and insists on driving although she is alarmingly bad, screeching the gears and turning far too wide. “What happens when you have a driver all your life,” she says with a shrug when Will finally demands she pull over so he can take the wheel.

“You look well,” he says, glancing over. She’s in a spring dress, now that the weather has gotten warmer, and a wide-brimmed yellow straw hat.

“I found my old tailor, and he whipped up a few things for me. He desperately needs the work and I have events I’m supposed to look nice for.”

He doesn’t ask.

She takes him to the Peninsula.

“It’s the Toa now, remember,” she says.

Trudy is greeted with smiles and bows as she sweeps through the formerly grand lobby, which is now filled with soldiers, steel tables, and other grim army-issue furniture.

“Otsubo has a suite of rooms here so Dommie and I stay in them. He’s requisitioned a place up on Barker Road for himself. It’s better here than the rat hole we have outside. We’re lucky. You wouldn’t believe how people are living outside, two or three families in a flat. Rather appalling, but I suppose it’s wartime. My old place has been requisitioned for some midlevel soldier. Insulting, isn’t it? I thought it was quite nice, myself.”

“How’s your father? ”

“Fine,” she says abruptly. “He’s fine.”

“What are you doing for funds?” Now that he is outside, he is thinking of matters he has not had to worry about in weeks.

“We’re allowed to withdraw a little money every week, but it’s touchy. Not large amounts, obviously, but nonetheless it’s odd for them to know you have accounts that you’re drawing against. You don’t want to make them wonder too much. Everything’s fluid, in a bad way. There are no rules, and even if there were, they could be changed at any moment.”

“Do you have to look out for yourself? Isn’t Otsubo the magic trump card?”

Trudy considers. Her mouth draws into a bow. Will resists the urge to kiss her small, self-preserving face.

“Mmmmm… I wouldn’t say a trump card because he’s rather mercurial. He does favors and then regrets them. He gives and wants to take away. And he has to be persuaded rather strongly not to. Not a generous man. Powerful men usually aren’t. Here we are.” She opens a door into a room that is a veritable palace compared with his quarters back at Stanley. A suite with large windows overlooking the blue sea dotted with boats, plush carpet, thick silk draperies, and fans that swing lazily around and around.

“Welcome to the Pen!” Trudy curtsies.

“Look at this,” he says, sitting on the bed. “A bed made up with actual linens! Curtains to draw against the sun! And I wager there’s even toilet paper in the bathroom.”

“You would be right. And now, do you want to thank me, you ingrate? It’s been complaint and suspicion ever since I cooked this up. Thank me.”

The reunion is sweet, the late afternoon sun slanting through the window, the flat horizon of the sea and the boats floating in the harbor, and Trudy, right here, right next to him. He has thought of her for so long, missed the feel of her skin and the smell of her breath, that he moves as if he’s in a dream. She is quiet, more than usual, and seems skittish. They are both too sapped, too thirsty, to ever be quenched by something as mundane as the physical.

“Tell me the truth,” she says, sitting up afterward, clutching the sheet, “is there a hussy you have in Stanley? Some American vixen who’s stolen your heart? Surely you can’t have been celibate all this time, someone as voracious as you. What else do you have to amuse you in that dreary camp?”

“I’m only voracious around you, you know.” He doesn’t ask her the same question, feels any answer would be unbearable. If he can keep some small part of her for himself, it might be all right. “Don’t mind about those things, and I won’t either.” He extends this olive branch so that their time together might be enjoyed.

She relaxes and curls into him.

“It’s been horrible,” Trudy says. “The Japanese are rounding up Chinese who are sympathetic, shall we say, or pretend that they are, for business purposes, and holding these absurd dinners where their policies are toasted with champagne and they’re lionized as if they’ve made enormous contributions to society. All quite surreal. Victor Chen is hot and heavy with the Japanese, of course, and trying to do business with them every which way. I’m worried about Dommie. Victor is just using him.