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  No, she wouldn't go. She couldn't live her life as someone's prisoner the way he had lived his, caught up in a dream of the past, with no way forward and no way back, forced to dig down inside oneself.

  But she'd come this far; where could she go now? She stared at her fingernails, kept short for the past two years for the factory. Her hands were chapped from the constant soaking in disinfectants. She thought about her twenty years at the credit union, about giving birth to a son and making a home for her family. What had it all meant? In the end, she was no more or less than the reality of all those years, with all the marks they'd left on her. And, unlike Satake, she had faced everything reality had brought her way. His idea of freedom had been different from hers.

  She punched the elevator button. She would go and buy an airplane ticket. The freedom she was seeking was her own, not Satake's, or Yayoi's, or Yoshie's, and she was sure it must be out there somewhere. If one more door had closed behind her, she had no choice but to find a new one to open. The elevator moaned like the wind as it came to meet her.