Munroe sat with Alina on the stairwell landing, sweat-drenched and waiting out the remainder of the day, where Alina might, if they were lucky, catch a glimpse of whoever had been with Bradford the night the belt had been taken.

Two men walked out of the facility entrance. Alina straightened, said “Oh!” then sighed and said, “No.”

Another false positive.

After the first three, Munroe had ignored the rest.

Another half hour of nothing and Munroe said, “I have to work late tonight—into the morning. It’s the type of thing that would be better if you stayed at the hotel.”

Alina’s lips pressed together. She wrapped her arms around her knees and said, “I will come with you.”

“You’ll be safer in the room.”

Several minutes of silence passed. As if picking up where they’d left off, Alina said, “I will come with you.”

Munroe glanced at her. “At the hotel, you’re in one place, behind a locked door. If you come with me, I can’t promise that you won’t get hurt. If things go badly, I can’t promise that I won’t leave you behind.”

Alina nodded, contemplating. She said, “Jiro will find me at the hotel and there I am, alone, behind a locked door, with no one to see him come or go.”

“There’s no trail for him to follow to find you.”

“Someone already found you without a trail.”

“That’s different,” Munroe said, and she turned back to watching the facility entrance.

“He is very well connected,” Alina said. “Government. Police. Business. Like a small army to do what he says. He has to make an example of me. We don’t see him, but his people are looking and I don’t want to be in the hotel alone when his men come.”

The facility doors opened again. Alina glanced up, but still nothing.

They stayed on the landing until the workday ended, and then Munroe retrieved the Ninja and parked it at the side of the building, down a pedestrian path, near a dozen bicycles and a single scooter. The evening came, the sky darkened, and shortly after nine, Okada left the building with a group of several men.

Munroe nudged Alina and they jogged down the stairs for the bike, sudden action after so much waiting. Okada and his workmates drove in two cars, and Munroe followed, keeping a long line of vehicles between them.

Twelve-hour days at the office weren’t enough. Now came the after-work in snack bars, which were hostess club lite, or karaoke clubs, hostess clubs, or izakaya, which were drinking establishments.

Several kilometers took them to a strip of pavement just wide enough to get off the road. The two cars parked. Beside the parking strip was a single structure, old and worn, with wooden walls and a clay tile roof. Neon at the door and window clashed with the serenity of the paper lanterns that hung off wide, curved eaves. Munroe continued past.

Finding a break in traffic, she looped a U-turn, pulled off the road, and squeezed the Ninja backward into a narrow alley between buildings just up the road. Bradford hadn’t been joking when he’d said she’d be grateful for the Mira’s smaller size, but even the car needed conventional parking.

Munroe tugged off the helmet and Alina did likewise, asking no questions, making no conversation, but remaining a pebble in Munroe’s boot all the same.

Okada left the bar shortly after eleven while the rest of his coworkers remained. He wasn’t falling down drunk, but clearly not sober. He put key to ignition and Munroe smiled. In a culture where conformity meant everything, Okada was a rule breaker—or at the least, a rule bender.

Society cast no shame on public drunkenness, rarely required ID for alcohol purchases, turned a blind eye to minors drinking, and viewed inebriation as a pressure valve: a socially acceptable excuse for inexcusable behavior.

But there was zero tolerance for driving under any influence.

High-end restaurants and izakayas often refused to serve alcohol to drivers. Police checkpoints for breath analysis were common. Okada, simply by getting behind the wheel, risked the loss of his license, fines, and years in prison. Munroe followed him east, toward the mountains, in the same direction they’d gone on the night Bradford had been arrested.

They were in the hills when he turned off, into a neighborhood of square and modern houses, neat and tidy, squished tightly in long stretches of single-lane alley-width streets.

Munroe increased the distance, following the reflection of Okada’s taillights against the road to guide her in a delayed turn-by-turn. She stopped before the entrance to his street, left Alina with the bike, and walked ahead to watch as he maneuvered his car backward into a space between light pole and house, parking so narrow it would have been reserved for motorcycles back in Dallas. He went from the car up the plant-hedged walkway to the front door, and lights turned on upstairs.

Munroe returned to Alina and crawled the bike away.

The upstairs light had been Okada’s wife, waking to welcome her husband home, to prepare his food and heat his ofuro, to do laundry as he ate, and then to clean up his mess when he was finished. If she was traditional, she would also rise again in five hours to prepare the bento he’d take to work and lay out his clothes.

Things were changing, but many still adhered to the old ways: some out of habit; some out of cultural expectations; some because tradition bound wives to their husband and his family and a myriad of time-consuming rules and societal roles; and some because marriage—no matter her education, talent, aspirations, or value—was a death knell to her career that would soon find her fired, leaving her no other option. But the light in Okada’s window only said that a wife who’d already fed and bathed the children, put them to bed and gone to bed herself, had risen when he’d come home.

Several streets over, Munroe found a park and playground and waited there, utilizing a bench as a bed, ignoring Alina, studying the stars, allowing memory and strategy to take her to the random places memory often did. When the night had deepened enough, Munroe rose, left Alina with the Ninja, and followed the streetlights to Okada’s little blue Nissan.