“Yes.”
The nerve of it almost made her angry. Then she realized he was not pleading. He was simply stating the cost and asking her to decide.
“You assume I care more about your family than my own future.”
He turned his face toward the window, where dawn had only just started whitening the dark glass. “No. I assume you are the kind of woman who saved a stranger’s child because she could not walk away.”
That irritated her because it was true.
He wrote the note that same night in cramped, elegant English block letters on the back of a torn page from a Gideons Bible. Eleanor watched him because she had to. The message was short. He was alive as of February 1944. He had not surrendered by choice; he had been wounded and taken. He wanted his wife, Aiko, to raise their daughter without shame if he never returned. At the end he added one sentence, then folded the page before she could read it properly.
“I need the cigarette case too,” he said.
“You’re asking for theft now.”
“A receipt exists. In the quartermaster lockbox.”
That turned out to be true. Two nights later, under the pretext of reconciling confiscated valuables for transfer, Eleanor located a small tin tray of POW effects. The silver case was there, dented near the hinge. Inside the false lining was a tiny black-and-white photograph: a Japanese woman in a dark kimono seated beside a little girl of maybe five, straight-backed, solemn, both looking at the camera as if posing for time itself.
Eleanor should have put it back.
Instead she slipped the photograph into her stocking and told herself she would decide later.
But events moved faster than her conscience.
In early March, a naval intelligence officer arrived from Washington to interview Takamura. The man’s name was Commander Lewis Harrow, and he had the clipped speech and dry smile of someone who considered compassion a procedural weakness. Eleanor overheard enough to know Takamura was more important than his chart suggested. He had served in naval logistics and shipyard design. He knew routes, depots, and fuel transfers. Harrow wanted details. Takamura gave almost nothing.
After the interview, Harrow stopped Eleanor in the corridor.
“You’ve spent more time with the prisoner than most,” he said. “Has he requested unusual items?”
Her throat tightened. “Bandages. Water. Morphine when prescribed.”
“Nothing else?”
“No, sir.”
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