She did not spend any extra hours with Sylvie; there would be ample time in the future. Rather, she was vigilant of Hector and his movements, noting when he was at work outside on the grounds, or at the sewer ditch, or else left the orphanage at night for the red-light section of the city, which he was frequenting again. Maybe Sylvie had broken it off with him. Certainly the Tanners seemed closer than before, often sitting together at meals among the children. June was practically joyous on seeing Hector return early one morning with his fatigue jacket ripped at the shoulder, his lip bruised, not because he was injured but because he was going into town and drinking and fighting again, which in her ever-grinding calculus was a sure sign that he had relinquished any hope of a civilized future with Sylvie. Whenever Hector did emerge from his room he was always in his soiled work clothes and boots, heading for the ditch digging, which he had almost finished. He’d been working continuously and even set up an oil lamp and dug for a few hours at night before driving late into Seoul.

June openly followed him one morning. He paid no attention to her. He went straight past the Tanners’ cottage on the pathway down the hill to the end of the dig, a mere ten meters to go to the as yet empty pit, setting to work immediately, pickaxing as if he were attempting to injure the ground or himself. But neither seemed to give, the soil at that spot so rocky and compacted that the ax would viciously rebound every so often and almost strike him in the face. Eventually he prevailed. He didn’t seem to tire, only the force of his blows slightly diminishing, his rhythm staying true until he was finished and simply stopped, his chest bellowing deeply in and out.

She approached him and told him that she would fetch him some water if he liked. He didn’t look up or reply, just shoveled the loosened earth and rock. She stood there for a moment and then ran back to where the kitchen aunties worked and made sure to catch the eye of Reverend Tanner, who followed her with his gaze as he conducted Bible study for the younger children beneath the pavilion. When she got back to Hector she offered him the tin bowl of water. Hector paused from his shoveling and quickly drank it all.

“Thanks,” he said, again gripping his shovel.

“Do you want more?”

“No.”

“I can bring you some food.”

He shook his head and turned to resume working.

She said, “Could I help you?”

“No.”

“I’m strong. Let me try,” she said. It was then that Reverend Tanner and the group of younger children approached the edge of the low hillside. Hector’s back was turned to them. Seeing her chance, June reached around him for the pickax.

“Leave that alone,” he said. “It’s too heavy. Just go, okay?”

But June was already removing her light wool sweater, rolling it up over her head. Her blouse was untucked from the band of her long skirt and as it was pulled by the sweater she let it ride up, over her bare chest, taking her time to unfurl the sweater from her head before the fabric naturally fell and draped down again. From his downcast eyes she knew her breasts were clearly showing through the thin white shirting. She let her sweater fall to the ground and when he didn’t move she stepped quickly to him, as if he’d pulled her in an embrace. He tried to push her away but she clung tighter to him the more he squirmed and she was exhilarated by how tenacious she could be, how resilient, though a reciprocal, near-hungering ache uncoiled in her gut from the hard pads of his hands. Finally she pushed away from him, letting herself fall to the ground.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Hector shouted.

She expected to hear Tanner’s voice but when she looked up she glimpsed only his dark minister’s jacket and the tops of the children’s heads bobbing away as they hiked back toward the compound.

“Don’t you ever do that again,” Hector growled. “Don’t you ever touch me like that.”

“I won’t!” she said defiantly.

She put on her sweater and ran off. In the central yard it was nearly lunchtime, the younger children playing tag while the aunties set up tables outside, as it was a warm fall day. Sylvie and several older girls were bringing out utensils and cups and she joined them. Reverend Tanner was already sitting at one of the tables, watching their play with an opened Bible before him. June was ready to tell him a broader story of what Hector had done, or tried to do, but Tanner said nothing to her. He only glanced at the freshly soiled patches on her skirt, on her sleeves, and although this surprised her she realized that he couldn’t talk about such things in front of his wife and other girls. In fact he didn’t need to talk about them at all, for she had done the necessary work, and as she began setting down chopsticks and spoons she felt that she was a wellspring and that Hector was a leaf just fallen on the surface, soon to be tided inexorably away.

YET HECTOR DIDN’T GO AWAY. It seemed impossible to her, but Reverend Tanner made nothing of witnessing her and Hector down in the ditch. He didn’t seem to care. A whole week went by, and at the end of it the reverend even talked animatedly with Hector about the sections of concrete piping just delivered by truck. Tanner even decided to help Hector with the job of joining the sections, suspending his schedule for two days while young Reverend Kim from Seoul came down to help Sylvie with his teaching and liturgical duties. June and some other children watched them from a perch above the gently sloping hillside. Each thick-walled concrete section was a half-meter round and as long as a man and it took them past dusk of the first day to lug all the sections of pipe down the run of the ditch. It was simple work and they didn’t have to say much of anything to each other and labored in a steady rhythm, lifting a section from the pile beside the main outhouse and walking it down sideways or with one of them backpedaling. As night fell one might have thought the two men were interring corpses in a strange, threading line of a mass grave. The next day it rained lightly and they shifted the sections, using shovels for leverage in order to connect them, and by the end when they shook hands ever so briefly they were covered brown-gray from head to toe in mud and joining mortar.

Sylvie was again not well. Maybe it was the pressure of her husband’s new wish for a child, or her own guilt about Hector, or else that she was craving him even as she knew she should not have him, but June could see the parched quality of her skin, the streaks of red at her elbows where she constantly scratched at herself showing through her blouse sleeve. She needed medicine for her kit.

June kept telling herself that she could be the remedy. She told herself to keep disciplined, to stay the course she had laid out, to remake herself along the lines of an entirely different girl: someone who was not an orphan at all, had not lost anyone in her life, much less witnessed any horrors or degradation. She was a normal child who would soon have a normal life. And it was shortly borne out: after the morning prayer Reverend Tanner announced that at the end of October young Reverend Kim, who substituted for him when he was away, would take over as director of the orphanage. “But what will you do?” a boy obtusely asked. “Mrs. Tanner and I must be leaving,” Tanner solemnly replied. “We have to go back to America.” There was a long second of silence and then all the children were crying, many outright wailing, some fallen to the ground, the rest crowding around him and Sylvie, both of whom were crying, too.

Only June did not fret, knowing that she would soon be asked to prepare for the journey. She knew from others they would fly first to Japan, then go on to either Alaska or Hawaii, before landing in San Francisco. From there they would take a shorter flight to Seattle, where the Tanners were from, a place that Sylvie had once described to her as a city shrouded in constant rain and fog, a place on earth but stuck in clouds, where one always felt the weight of dampness in one’s clothes and hair and skin, which was strangely comforting, once gotten used to. Naturally some found it oppressive. But June liked the idea that the weather was a near constant, like a too-loyal friend, something to bear around and tolerate and maybe cherish, even if it would never leave you alone. And she knew that she and Sylvie would be just that for each other, and in time perhaps she could prove the same for Reverend Tanner, who would come to see her not as a bane he had yielded to but the living picture of his grace.