Chapter 35: Secret Meetings

*July 1943*

James Sullivan found Rose three days after the alley.

She was leaving the factory, exhausted from ten hours of sewing uniforms—the irony of making clothes for an army that might one day fight against soldiers who looked like her brother—when she saw him waiting across the street.

"Miss Takahashi."

Rose stopped walking. "Lieutenant Sullivan."

"I wanted to check on you. Make sure you were alright after..." He gestured vaguely in the direction of the waterfront.

"I'm fine."

"Good. That's good." He seemed nervous, which was strange for a man in uniform. "I also wanted to—well, I was wondering if you might—"

"Lieutenant, if you're trying to ask me something, just ask it."

He laughed—a warm, easy sound that cut through her exhaustion.

"I was wondering if you might let me walk you home."

Rose looked at him: the uniform, the confident stance, the vulnerability beneath the soldier's facade. She thought about what her mother would say if she knew Rose was talking to a white man in public. She thought about what the other factory girls would say if they saw her with an officer.

She thought about her father, asking her to live.

"I'm staying in a rooming house on Burnside," she said. "It's about a mile."

"I like walking."

They walked together through Portland's evening streets, attracting stares that ranged from curious to hostile. Rose kept her head high and her eyes forward. She had survived the first eighteen years of her life in a country that didn't want her; she could survive a walk with a handsome soldier.

"Can I ask you something?" James said.

"You can ask. I might not answer."

"The other day, in the alley. Why did you stop? You could have kept walking. It would have been safer."

Rose considered the question. "Because someone needed help. Because I was capable of helping. Because—" She paused. "Because my father told me to live, not just survive. And living means caring about other people."

"Your father sounds like a wise man."

"He was."

The past tense hung between them. James didn't push.

---

The walks became routine.

Three days a week, James waited outside the factory and walked Rose home. They talked about everything: his childhood in Massachusetts, her childhood in Oregon, the books they'd read, the places they dreamed of seeing. They talked about the war—carefully, aware of how much couldn't be said—and about the future, which felt both impossibly distant and urgently close.

"My family has been in America for four generations," James said one evening. "We came over from Ireland during the famine. My great-grandfather worked the docks in Boston, my grandfather worked his way up to foreman, my father became a lawyer. Each generation doing a little better than the last."

"The American dream."

"Something like that. Except the dream doesn't include everyone, does it? My family was able to climb the ladder because eventually people stopped seeing us as Irish and started seeing us as white. Your family—"

"My family built something just as real. We had a farm, a business, a community. All of it taken in a single executive order."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be sorry. Be angry."

James looked at her—really looked, the way he always did, as if she was a puzzle he was trying to solve.

"I am angry," he said quietly. "I'm angry that my country, the country I'm preparing to die for, treats its own citizens like enemies. I'm angry that there are people in camps who've done nothing wrong except exist. I'm angry that I can't do anything about it."

"You could do something."

"What?"

Rose didn't answer immediately. She was still forming the thought, still trying to give shape to an idea that had been brewing since her father's funeral.

"The camps aren't permanent," she said finally. "They can't be. Someday this war will end, and the people inside will be let out. When that happens, they're going to need help. Housing, jobs, legal protection. Someone to advocate for them."

"And you think I could be that someone?"

"I think you're a man with connections, resources, and a conscience. That's more than most people have."

James was quiet for a long moment. They had stopped walking without meaning to, standing in the shadow of a warehouse as the evening light faded.

"You're remarkable," he said. "Do you know that?"

"I'm practical."

"Same thing." He smiled. "I can't fix everything that's wrong with this country. But maybe I can fix one or two things. Maybe, when the war is over, I can find ways to help."

"When the war is over. That's a long way away."

"Then we'd better start planning now."

---

August brought complications.

James received orders. He was shipping out in three weeks—destination classified, duration unknown. The walks became precious, each one weighted with the knowledge that it might be among the last.

"I don't want to talk about the war tonight," Rose said on their final walk together. "I don't want to think about ships or orders or any of it."

"What do you want to talk about?"

"Tell me about the place you want to see most in the world."

James considered this. "Paris. The old Paris, before the Nazis got there. The cafés and the bookshops and the artists arguing about art."

"Have you ever been?"

"No. But I've read about it. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein. The whole lost generation thing." He laughed softly. "I know it's romantic and probably unrealistic. But I think about going there someday, sitting in a café, drinking wine, pretending I'm a writer."

"You are a writer. Your letters are beautiful."

James had been writing to her—letters that arrived at the rooming house in official Army envelopes, addressed to a false name to avoid suspicion. Rose kept them under her mattress, reading them so many times she'd memorized entire passages.

"Letters aren't books."

"They're still words. They still matter."

They had reached the rooming house. James stopped at the corner, as he always did, maintaining the pretense that they were strangers who happened to walk in the same direction.

"Rose."

"Yes?"

"When I come back—" He stopped, started again. "If I come back—"

"When you come back."

"When I come back. I'd like to take you somewhere. Not a walk home from work. A real date. A restaurant, dancing, whatever you want."

Rose thought about what that would mean. A white soldier and a Japanese-American woman, together in public, in a country that wasn't sure either of them deserved to exist.

"When you come back," she said, "I'd like that very much."

---

He left on September 3rd, 1943.

Rose didn't go to the dock to watch him leave—it was too risky, too visible—but she stood on the hill above the harbor and watched the ship grow smaller and smaller until it disappeared into the gray Pacific.

Three weeks of walks. A handful of letters. A connection that felt deeper than anything she'd known.

It wasn't enough time to fall in love.

And yet.

When Rose returned to her rooming house, she found a package waiting on her bed. Inside was a book—a well-worn copy of *A Moveable Feast*, Hemingway's Paris memoir—and a letter.

*Dear Rose,*

*I know we haven't known each other long. I know the world would say what we're doing is impossible, inappropriate, wrong. I know there are a hundred reasons we shouldn't write to each other, think about each other, miss each other.*

*I don't care about any of them.*

*You asked me to tell you about Paris. Here's Hemingway's version. Read it and think of me, and I'll think of you, and maybe someday we'll sit in a café together and compare notes.*

*Wait for me.*

*Yours,*

*James*

Rose held the book against her chest and let herself cry—for the first time since her father's death, tears that weren't just grief but something else. Something that felt like hope.

She would wait.

However long it took.

She would wait.