The Last Assassin

hands. That thing he had said about what she was going to tell Koichiro about his father had stung. She had considered the issue many times, of course, but could never come up with a comfortable answer. It was easier to just defer things, to tell herself she would figure it out as Koichiro got older, but now she wasn't sure.
    When she had first learned she was pregnant, she felt her body had betrayed her, as though she was a woman carrying the child of a soldier who had raped her in war. She had made an appointment at a clinic, determined to end the pregnancy immediately and never think of it again. But that same night, as she lay in bed staring at the ceiling, one hand half-consciously rubbing her belly, she thought maybe it was better not to act so hastily. It was still early. Why not sleep on it for a few nights, make up her mind more deliberately? The option to abort would still be there. It wasn't going away.
    But those few nights turned into many. She thought ceaselessly about her circumstances. She loved living in New York, loved doing gigs here, loved the freedom of life away from Japan. And meeting men was easy enough. She saw the way they gazed at her while she played, many of them repeat customers, and she was aware of the nervous timbre of their voices when they approached her to thank her after a performance. She went out with a few, but none of them had interested her long-term.
    At some point, she had come to understand that, in her late thirties, the chance for marriage and a family had probably passed. But that was okay. She concentrated on all the good things in her life and told herself that a husband and the rest would have interfered. But on those long sleepless nights after she learned she was pregnant, she realized she had been making a virtue of a necessity. Because her circumstances had seemed unchangeable, she had been motivated to accept them. But everything was different now.
    She believed in fate, and this felt like fate to her. Yes, she knew she could choose to abort as she could choose to have the baby, so how could either alternative be fate, really? But she didn't care about the logic so much. It was her intuition she listened to. And her intuition told her to have the baby.
    But she felt no desire to try to contact Rain. It wasn't only because of her father. It was because of what Rain was. Then, when the baby was born, her conviction that she should never tell him only deepened. From the moment the doctor brought that tiny child from her agonized, exhausted body and she heard him cry and held him hot and slick in her arms, she knew she had to keep him from the danger Rain represented.
    And now that she had Koichiro, she couldn't imagine anything other than the two of them together. Her previous life, good as it was, seemed almost a dream, and the thought that she had nearly gone through with an abortion was enough to make her feel sick, as though she had once in a moment of weakness contemplated murdering her child. She would never have thought it possible, but she defined herself as this little boy's mother more than she had defined herself as anything else before.
    She stood up, went into the bedroom, and watched Koichiro sleep. She realized that all her internal protests about her feelings for Rain had been window dressing, a flimsy façade that had crumbled at his first appearance. She felt a pang of guilt, as though her own feelings for this man were a betrayal of her father. But would her father have wanted her to die leaving him no grandchildren? And would he have wanted his grandchild to grow up not knowing his father? Surely Koichiro's paternity was of small significance in comparison with these larger issues. And it was true that Rain had tried to finish her father's efforts to expose corruption in the government, that this was his way of trying to rectify, even to atone for what he had done. She felt that in some inexplicable way, her father would have appreciated what Rain had done afterward. That he might even have… forgiven him.
    She leaned over and kissed Koichiro's forehead, then stood looking at him again. Seeing Rain holding their baby, and for the first time seeing him cry, had softened something inside her, she knew. She didn't know what she wanted, or what she would do if Rain came back. She no longer felt sure of anything. Except for this sweet child. She would do anything to protect him. Anything in the world.

8

    I turned left on the sidewalk at Waverly,