“My way is seeming fairly stupid at this point.”

“That’s in the past, Anya,” he said in a matter-of-fact voice. “We are where we are. Sophia Bitter was a psychopath, and I am astonished that you managed to survive. Now the knight is perhaps the most difficult piece to master. He moves in an L.”

“How do you know the knight’s a he?” I asked. “There could be anything under that armor.” He smiled at me. “Good girl.”

At the end of November, I checked out of the hospital and moved back to Yuji Ono’s house. A nurse came with me, and she set me up in Yuji’s old room, which was the most convenient room in the house. I tried not to think of the fact that the last inhabitant of this room had died slowly and painfully.

By December, I was moving around with a walker. By February, I had crutches. By the middle of March, my cast came off, revealing a spectacularly lifeless foot in sickly shades of yellow, green, and gray. Structurally, it did not look sound either: the arch was flat, my ankle was as skinny as my wrist, and my toes curled strangely and uselessly. I looked at those toes and wondered what purpose they had ever served. I would rather have avoided the spectacle of my foot, though this was not an option—I had to look at it constantly, because it didn’t work! When I set my foot down, I could not feel the ground. They gave me a brace and a cane. I lurched around like a zombie. It is beyond boring to have to instruct your brain to move your leg and then your leg to move your foot and then to have to check to see where the ground is with every step.

As for the rest of my body? It was not what I would call attractive. Thick pink scars snaked up the middle of my chest, under my shoulder, down my lower back, across my neck, down my leg and foot, under my chin. Some of the scars were from the attack; some were from the measures the doctors had taken to save my life. What I looked like was a girl who had been stabbed by a maniac and had heart surgery, which is exactly what I was. When exiting the bath, I tried not to consider myself too closely. I took to wearing long, loose, high-necked dresses, which Mr. Delacroix said made me look like a frontierswoman.

The truth was, the scars did not bother me very much. I was far more self-conscious about the fact that my foot didn’t work properly and far more annoyed by the constant pain I was in due to the nerve damage I’d sustained from being stabbed in the spine.

Pain … for a long time, that was all I could think about. The person known asAnya Balanchine had been replaced with a body that hurt. I was a throbbing, aching, monstrous, cranky ball. It did not make me pleasant to be around, I am sure. (I am not what you would call an upbeat person to start with.)

As I was afraid of slipping and falling, I stayed indoors a lot that winter. I took up reading.

I played chess with Mr. Delacroix.

I began to feel ever so slightly better. I even considered turning on my slate, but I decided against

it. In my current condition, I did not wish to hear from Win. I did however speak to Theo, Mouse, and Scarlet on the phone. Sometimes, Scarlet would put Felix on the line. He wasn’t that great a conversationalist, but I liked talking to him anyway. At the very least, he never asked me how I was feeling.

“What’s going on, kid?” I said.

What was going on was that my three-year-old godson had a girlfriend. Her name was Ruby, and she was an older woman—four. She’d proposed marriage, but he wasn’t sure he was ready. She was nice most of the time, but boy, could she be bossy. He wasn’t entirely sure, but he suspected he might have been tricked into marrying her already. There had been an ambiguous incident involving a kiss in a coat cubby and what had been either the loan or the gift of a can of clay. As he somewhat lacked for vocabulary, this story took about an hour to tell, but it was fine. I had time.

And then, because the world is relentless this way, it was spring.

The sakura trees on Yuji’s estate bloomed, the ground thawed, and I began to fear falling less. There were even signs of life in my dead foot, and I could more or less make myself end up where I wanted to go, though it took a million years.

I sometimes walked the path to the pond where I had been attacked. The trip that had taken me less than five minutes a half dozen months ago now took me forty. The fish were still alive. The blood had been scoured away. There was no evidence that I had killed someone there and had almost been killed myself. The world is relentless in this way, too.

More often than not, Mr. Delacroix came with me. Still, we did not speak much of business, which is what we had always spoken of before. Instead, we talked of our families: his son, his wife, my childhood, his childhood, my mother, my father, my siblings, my nana. He had been orphaned when he was young. His father, who had been in coffee, had killed himself when the Rimbaud laws went into effect. He was adopted when he was twelve by a wealthy family, fell in love with a girl at fifteen—his ex-wife, Win’s mother. He was heartbroken over the divorce and he loved his wife still, though he accepted that he was at fault and held out little hope that there would be a happy ending in his future.

“Was it the club?” I asked him. “Is that why you divorced?”

“No, Anya. It was much more than that. It was years of neglect and bad choices on my part. You have a thousand chances to make something right. That’s a heck of a lot of chances, by the way. But they do run out eventually.”

Mr. Delacroix encouraged me to venture from Yuji’s estate, even for an afternoon, but I was reluctant. I preferred hobbling around where no one could see me. “Some day you’ll have to leave here,” he said.

I tried not to think about that.

The second to last Sunday in April, Mr. Delacroix insisted we go out. “I have a reason you can’t argue with.”

“I doubt that,” I said. “I can argue with anything.” “Have you forgotten what today is?”

Nothing came to mind.

“It’s Easter,” he said. “The day even lapsed Catholics like you and me manage to darken the church’s door. I see you are more lapsed than I thought.”

I was beyond lapsed. What I truly believed was that I was beyond redemption. Since the last time I’d gone to Mass with Scarlet and Felix, I’d killed a person. There was no point in believing in Heaven if you were certain the only place you could end up was Hell. “Mr. Delacroix, you can’t have found a Catholic church in Osaka.”

“There are Catholics everywhere, Anya.” “I’m surprised you even go on Easter,” I said.

“You mean because I am so evil, I suppose. But sinners especially deserve their annual portion of redemption, don’t you think?”

The courtyard had granite statues of the Virgin Mary and Jesus. Both had Japanese features. Usually, Jesus reminded me of Theo, but in Osaka, he looked more like Yuji Ono.

The liturgy was the same as it was in New York—mostly Latin, though the English parts were in Japanese. It was not hard for me to follow. I knew what was being said, and I knew when to nod my assent, whether I meant it or not.

I found myself thinking of Sophia Bitter.

I could still see her face when I’d plunged that machete through her heart. I could smell the scent of her blood mixed with mine.

If given the chance, I would kill her again.

So I probably wouldn’t be going to Heaven. No amount of church or confession could fix me anymore. The Easter service was lovely though. I was glad to have gone.

We both decided to skip confession. Who even knew if the priest spoke English? “Do you feel renewed?” Mr. Delacroix asked me on the way out.