No actual money changed hands, although he did pay for her rebooked return flight. But the experience gave her the idea of what could be done. She quit her job at the Bank of America, shortened her name to Shinn, and started to make a good living, alone, discreetly.

But there she was at Nissho’s, still a shell, carrying her father’s victim-load around with her. Men had been doing what they wanted with her for ten years. She couldn’t be further debased or devalued. She was still in demand, but there was no May Shintaka anymore, not even, she thought, much of a May Shinn, and she didn’t really care. Her usefulness, if she’d ever had any, was at an end.

Then Owen Nash had walked to her table. He sat down, uninvited. She raised her eyes to look at him. ‘Yes?’

‘Are you as alone as you look?’

Of the many men she had known, she recognized something in Owen Nash that she thought she had given up on.

In her business – it was inevitable – you got to thinking all men were the same, or similar enough that the small differences didn’t matter.

Here was a man, though, who on first meeting caught you in an aura, swept you up in it. He stood over her, looking down, giving off a sense of power, with a massive, muscular torso, a square face and eyes that vibrated with life and, half-hidden, suffering…

She stared at him, not wanting to acknowledge what she intuitively felt – that this man already knew her, knew what she was feeling. ‘Are you as lonely as you look?’ An old pickup line. But this, she felt, wasn’t just that. He was telling her that they were connected, somehow. Suddenly, with nothing else holding her to her meaningless life, she wanted to know how the connection worked and what it might mean.

He had reserved the private room in the back, but had been watching her from the kitchen, where he was helping prepare the side dishes to accompany his main course of fugu, a blowfish delicacy in Japan that killed you if you prepared it wrong.

After sharing the meal, they both waited for the slight numbness on the tongue. Owen had brought a bottle of aged Suntory whisky and they sipped it neat out of the sake cups.

During the meal, he had gotten back some of what she would come to know as his usual garrulous persona. Now he ran with it, laughing, loud in the tiny room, emptying his sake cup.

‘I think you’re unhappy,’ she said. ‘If the fish had been wrong, it could have poisoned you.’

He drank his whiskey. ‘There’s risk in everything. You do what you need to -’

‘And you need to risk death? Why? Someone like you?’

They were alone in the room, sitting on the floor. The table had been cleared – only the Suntory bottle and the two cups were left on the polished teak.

‘It’s a game,’ he said, not smiling. ‘It’s something I do, that’s all.’

She shook her head. This wasn’t any game for him. ‘I think that’s why you came over and talked to me. You recognized me. I am like you.’

She told him she wanted him to follow her – she would show him what wanting to die was really like. They walked twenty blocks in the deep fog to her apartment. He followed her up the stairs. In the foyer, she stepped out of her shoes and went into the bathroom, where she turned on the bath. She went to the refrigerator and got out the wine, opened it. It was as though he weren’t there.

She went to her dresser and took off her earrings, her necklace. Unbuttoning the black silk blouse, she felt him moving up close behind her, but he didn’t touch her, didn’t speak. That was the understanding. She continued to disrobe – her brassiere, her slacks, the rest.

She finished the first glass of wine in a gulp and poured herself a second, which she brought to the bathroom. The bath was ready, the mirror steamed. He sat on the toilet seat, watching her lather, occasionally sipping from the Suntory bottle he’d carried with him.

She stood and rinsed under a hot shower, then stepped out and over to the medicine cabinet, where she took down the prescription bottle and poured the pills, at least twenty of them, into her hand. She lifted her glass of wine, threw back her head and emptied her hand into her mouth.

Which is when Owen moved, knocking the glass out of her hand, smashing it to the tiles, grabbing her, his fingers in her mouth, forcing the pills out into the sink, the toilet, onto the floor.

That had been the beginning.

The shrine was gone in the clang of the bars, the door opening. ‘Shinn. D.A.’s here to see you. Move it.‘

Remember who you are, she told herself. You are not what they think you are.

It wasn’t quite eleven in the morning. Out the windows, through the bars, she saw the sun high in the sky.

The interview room was like a cell without toilet or bars. It was furnished with an old, pitted gray desk and three chairs. She sat down across from the man, casual in jeans and a rugby shirt. He introduced himself, Mr Hardy, and some woman he called a D.A. investigator. He would be taping this interview. He asked how they were treating her.

‘I need more phone calls,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t be in here.’

She was not stupid. She was a citizen, and she wasn’t going to fall into the trap that had ensnared her father. She had to believe that there was another reason she was arrested – it was not because she was Japanese. She told Hardy about her attempted call to Ken Farris.

‘I could call Farris for you. He tried to call you several times last week, you know.’

‘I didn’t kill Owen Nash,’ she said.

‘I wouldn’t say anything you didn’t want to hear repeated.’

‘Then why are you here?’

‘I thought you might want to tell me what happened. Maybe we could both get lucky.’

‘What happened when?’

The man shrugged. ‘Last night. The arrest. The last time you saw Owen Nash.’

‘Shouldn’t I have a lawyer?’

‘Absolutely. You have the right to one. You don’t have to say one word to me.’

But she found she wanted to explain, to talk. ‘I’m not sure I even understand why I’m here.’

‘I think trying to leave the country was a bad idea.’

‘But I knew -’ She stopped herself. ‘Don’t you see?’

‘See what?’

She picked her words carefully, slowly. ‘When I saw my name in the paper, I knew I’d be suspected.’

‘Were you out on the boat with him?’

‘No! I told the officer that, the one who arrested me.’

‘Then why would we suspect you?’

‘I’m Japanese.’ No, she told herself. That was her father’s answer. But it was too late to retract it now. ‘And it’s true,’ she said. ‘You do suspect me, with no reason. Who I am, what I have done for a living.’ She knew she should be quiet, wait for an attorney, but she couldn’t. The gun, too.‘

‘Your gun?’

She nodded. ‘I knew it was on the boat. That’s where I left it. I didn’t want it in my apartment. I couldn’t even bring myself to load it. Owen thought I was silly.’

‘So you kept it on the Eloise?’

‘In the desk, by the bed.’

The man frowned, something bothering him. ‘You knew it was there when you went out on Saturday?’

‘Yes, but -’

‘So you did go out on Saturday.’

‘No! I didn’t mean that, I meant when Owen went out. I knew it was there all the time. That’s where I kept it.’

‘Did anyone else know it was there?’

‘Well, Owen, of course.’ There was something else. She paused, not quite saying it. ‘Anyone could have.’

‘Anyone could have,’ he repeated.

‘Yes!’ She was starting to panic, to lose herself, and hoped it didn’t show in her voice. She forced herself to breathe calmly. ‘If it were me, why would I leave the gun on the boat after I shot him? Why wouldn’t I have thrown it overboard?’

‘I don’t know, May. Maybe you were in shock that you’d actually done it and reverted to habit, not thinking, putting the gun where it belonged. Why don’t you tell me?’