I smile. “Not yet.”

My son looks at me searchingly. “I’m waiting for you,” he says. He is trying to tell me something more, to make things right. The incomprehension in his eyes cracks my heart. I hold him and whisper in his ear. He says, “It was a mistake. Just a mistake.”

Navin comes to us.

Together, we put on our hats and scarves. I lock the door of the lab and then we go into the clear night. They continue, hand in hand, toward the stores and lights on St. Catherine Street. They have the same loping gait, their bodies sway, like paper boats, from side to side. For a long time, I stand there, trying to keep sight of them. They fade into the crowd. I turn in the other direction and begin walking back.

We kept the secret, Kiri and I. When Navin came home and saw the discoloured skin on his son’s face, Kiri said he had fallen at school. I let the lie stand. It had happened once. In a moment that seemed so large and inescapable, anger had suffocated me and then, just as quickly, dissolved. A few weeks later, Navin went away to London. I tried not to be alone with my son but Kiri, so small and confused, followed me from room to room. “You’re not here,” he kept saying. “Why aren’t you here?” I went out of the house and stood in the cold, desperate to find the way through. I told myself that I could fix things, I must stop what was happening.

In the apartment I turned the heat up high, but still my hands shook. The water came to me, everywhere, loud. Something had spilled on the kitchen floor and Kiri was walking through it, running, stamping his feet. I asked him to stop. My thoughts didn’t fit together. I heard noises all around us, I saw shapes coming nearer and Kiri shouting, oblivious. Stop, I said again. I tried to leave but he gripped my hands. I pulled away, but he was holding my clothes. I tried to free myself. In a moment of wildness, he grabbed a handful of forks and threw them down into the mess. The noise seemed like the ceiling crashing down, falling on top of us, blocking all the light. I raised my hand and hit him, once, twice. I cannot remember it all. And then, in an instant, the noise disappeared.

He was sitting on the floor, gasping, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

I knelt beside him, in shock. When I looked into his face, the bruise terrified me, I saw my child curled up, I smelled a burning in the room. He saw me watching him. “Don’t be scared,” Kiri said. “I’m going to fix everything. You don’t have to be scared of me.”

When we lay down that night, he asked me to stop crying, he said I had been crying for days. “What’s happening to you?”

“I don’t know, Kiri.”

He gazed at me, his eyes older now, beginning to understand. “You have to know,” he said softly. “You have to.”

Night after night, in the days that followed, he came into my room. “You’re dreaming,” he said, waking me. “Stop dreaming. Please stop dreaming.” He would crawl into the bed, saying that he was cold, that he did not want to sleep alone. I was afraid to hold my son. One day, Kiri called his father without my knowing. Bravely, he told Navin to return home, that I was ill. He didn’t know how else to describe what we were going through.

Frantic, Navin took the first flight back. I told him everything. At first, he didn’t believe, couldn’t believe.

“Ask him,” I told him. “Please.”

It was January, and the ice covered everything and I didn’t know anymore, I couldn’t explain, how this could have happened, why I could not control my hands, my own body. We went through the motions, going to school, going to work, but something inside me, inside Navin, was dying. The broken world finally fell apart. Our son didn’t understand and I saw that he blamed himself, that he tried so hard not to be the cause of my rage, my unpredictable anger. He aspired to a sort of perfection, as if it were up to him to keep us safe. We sat down with Kiri. I told my son that the only person to blame was myself. I told him that I had to go away for a little while.

“No,” he said to his father. “Please don’t do this. I take everything back.”

Navin came to Hiroji’s apartment carrying a box of my books, Lena’s picture, and a photograph he had taken of Kiri and me at the fairgrounds, La Ronde, the bright halo of the Ferris wheel behind us, neon colours stretching across our skin. He set the box down, weeping without seeming to realize there were tears. He asked me why I had never confided in him, how we had let it come to this. He had been my lover for more than a decade and yet, he said, I remained a stranger to him. Navin wandered around Hiroji’s apartment, taking in the dusty shelves, the pillow and blanket on the couch.

“I know you,” he said. “I’ve always known you.”

I struggled to understand. I remembered a whiteness that came, debilitating, that I tried to remove from my body. One morning, Navin brought me a letter from Meng, who planned to travel back to Cambodia and wanted me to go with him. There were things, he said, that we needed to talk about, to end. Night after night I tried to bring back the ones I had left behind. In the mornings, when I opened my eyes, I saw only the bare walls. Everything, the good and the selfish, the loved and the feared, had taken refuge inside me. Thirty years later and still I remembered everything.

The telephone wakes me. The cat startles, tips sideways, and runs away. Her paws drum along the hardwood floors as I wave my hand into the darkness, closing my fingers around the receiver. Navin. Before I can say hello, the person on the other end, a woman’s voice, has begun speaking.

“Tavy,” I say, interrupting her, fighting my way out from under a net of sleep. Bit by bit, the room sharpens. I struggle for Khmer words. “What time is it there?”

A long pause and I’m suspended on the line. “I’m not sure. I’m at the office, at DC–Cam. Maybe four in the afternoon?”

Four in the morning, then, in Montreal.

“But, you see,” she says, “I’m returning your call. You left a message last night.”

I start to say it wasn’t urgent but Tavy continues, cutting me off firmly. “I found something. There are letters, beginning in 1975. We found six, all addressed to James Matsui.”

I fumble for the lights and end up knocking over a glass of water. “Tavy, wait. Letters from whom? From someone in Canada?”

“No,” she says. She slows down, realizing now that I was sound asleep. “A young woman. Cambodian. All this time, since 1996, these letters were in the archives. They were filed under her name. Sorya. But now we’re updating the database, right? Everything is going into the computer. More key words, anything to help us identify people. After I got your message, I re-did the search for James Matsui, but I found Sorya’s file instead. He had donated the letters.

“Listen,” she says. I hear movement, papers sorted through. Tavy begins to read, “My darling James, today is the first day of the New Year. Heng came today and returned your camera …” She keeps going.

The water spreads in a puddle, touching my bare feet.

“She was his wife,” Tavy says. “Maybe Sorya is not her only name, probably she had an alias, many aliases. Nearly everyone did. I should look …”

“James wasn’t married. Or Hiroji never mentioned it.”

“But according to what she wrote …” Voices in the background, rising and falling. “She thought her letters were being smuggled to James,” Tavy says. Her voice is low, it mirrors my own surprise. “She took a risk and gave these letters to someone she trusted. Whoever it was, they told her that James Matsui was in hiding in the northeast, in the caves by the Cambodia — Laos border. Who knows if it was true? But in late 1975, she was arrested. I found her prison dossier — the usual, her biography, confessions, and also her photograph. There is nothing after 1976. But, also, there is no date of death.