In her dreams that night, Elly returned to the house in Provo. She was dressed as before in the white kimono. The sun shone down on the empty street. The driveway was a straight, clean line of asphalt, recently swept. The car crouched like a pensive cat inside the garage, the silver mustang on the grille plate gleaming from the shadows.

It was only after she started up the walk that she saw the boy. He was sitting by himself atop the porch steps, engrossed in a large manual that covered his lap. He glanced up, blue eyes under dark brows, and seemed not at all surprised to see her there.

"What are you reading?" she asked.

He held up the book: Chilton's Ford Mustang/Cougar 1964-73 Repair Manual. At the same time his head snapped up and to the left, the way a grazing deer freezes and flicks its gaze about at the sound of a breaking twig.

Elly glanced over her shoulder. A tall man strode up the walk. The boy's grandfather. He was thinner than the Connor she knew, showed a higher forehead, his silver hairline receding. But she couldn't miss the resemblance. There was a hard, determined look in his eyes. The look of a man who felt he'd been disrespected, even if on a matter of no great moment. He extended his right hand. The boy held out the book, shrinking as far away from his grandfather as was physically possible.

The man reached to take the book from the boy. As his hand extended, Elly seized the old man's wrist. "No," she said.

He cast a puzzled look at his arm and then at her, for the first time acknowledging her presence. Then everything dissolved away, and there was only the two of them, bathed in the stark light. He finally spoke, his voice gruff, annoyed. "I never touched the boy. He's got no cause to fear me."

"Yes," Elly said, speaking the words that suddenly echoed in her mind, that were not her own but became her own as she said them. "What you never did could fill the ocean. Yet all that nothing would never be enough."

They agreed to meet again on Friday, and Connor made another stab at composing his thoughts in an email. If his fate before the court depended on oral argument, he'd never stand a chance.

The night before, he'd journeyed back to Kudoyama. He ended up at a bar in an alley off the main drag. To make things that much weirder, Pat Morita had an American cowboy tagging along with him—a burly man decked out in jeans, a Stetson, and cowboy boots—the whole John Wayne outfit. The two of them wanted to know what he was doing there without Chieko. How should he know? These dreams weren't his idea.

Connor stared at the computer screen. He typed, "The older you get, the more invested you get in your tatemae (what the rest of the world can see) and the more you hide your honne (that which is privy to you alone). Easy enough to do when you're single, especially when you're single and Mormon. What's frightening is contemplating what's going to happen when somebody finds out how immense the gulf is between your tatemae and your honne."

He clicked the send button before he could talk himself out of it.

Connor leaned against the mezzanine railing watching the little soap operas playing out in the Terrace Court. He didn't hear her come up behind him until she said, "First of all, Connor, everybody's screwed up." She pressed on, not giving him time to respond. "Second, you haven't got much of a tatemae. You're pretty much honne all the way down. What I see is what I get. You don't know how reassuring that is."

She was right, he didn't know.

"Third, it is scary, and I've done nothing but show you the worst side of me. But I don't want to live my whole life being scared." She turned to him. "Connor, let's not have this argument, okay? Forget about getting married. I shouldn't have brought it up like that. Just don't leave me. Please. Stay with me till we wake. That's all I want. I've given you no reason to trust me, but trust me this once. Don't be afraid of me."

His expression softened. "I'm not afraid of you, Elly."

She clasped his hand, a firm yet gentle touch. Then she walked away.

Nobuo's terminology lists arrived (as they always did) Friday morning (Friday night, Japan time). Connor checked the attachments but didn't get around to reading the cover message until that evening. Nobuo had added a P.S.: "My daughter and wife have been debating whether you and Chieko are dating. I try to keep out of such matters, but they insist I ask."

Good grief, was his initial response. How did they know? Because Elly had asked for his email address. And dating? Were they? That was a good question. Not really. Fighting, yes—dating, no. He'd think of a better answer when he mailed back the corrections.

Connor went outside and watched the sun setting into the mountains beyond the flat plate of Utah Lake. He was making this all too complicated. Why not just stay in the dream? She asked him to stay. It obviously meant a lot to her. If there was going to be sex, shouldn't there be affection as well? Even if there'd never be any physical contact between them, wouldn't that make a difference?

Something—someone—had woven the threads of their individual lives together, creating a binding cord between them. In this span of days between Tanabata and Obon, between the Bridge of Birds and the Festival of the Dead (the time of year at once occurred to him), whose graves had stirred? Whose spirits had returned during this haunting season? Did he have to ask what they wanted? The dreams lacked all subtlety. But he wouldn't have listened otherwise.

Be practical, he told himself. He was a McKenzie. He was good at being that. He knew he'd been offered something extraordinary, the best thing that had ever happened in his life. But he was scared. If a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be condemned. He might as well invite in the wrecking crew. Loving her would change everything.

For the first time in his life, he found himself contemplating a possibility antithetical to the McKenzie mind: surrender. Not to fate (though that was a tough one for those ornery Celts). But a surrender of the pride that masqueraded as character, yet in the end revealed itself as little more than dumb stubbornness in disguise.

It was all about Newton's First Law: A body in a uniform state of motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it. It had been his father's family vacation transportation strategy: plot the straightest navigable line between where they were and where they wanted to end up in eight hours, and drive.

Ever since that distantly-remembered death when he was seven years old, Connor had been running straight ahead and in one direction—away. An external force had now been applied to his trajectory. It was time to stop and turn around and take the path less traveled, and that might make all the difference.