At the age of twenty, he left home to go to the country and traveled across the ocean.
On a foreign campus, she met a man. He is silent, withdrawn, and has a scar on his hand. There is an invisible line between them.
She gets closer to him, gaining his trust. He knew everything but never exposed it.
"Aren't you afraid that I will lie to you?"
"You lie."
She accepted what he handed her. Never hesitated. Because in her heart, there are things that are much more important than one person.
The war is over. He became a war criminal. She personally compiled the evidence against him. Those things, one by one, were all taken from his hands. He confessed and did not confess her.
Before execution, she went to see him one last time. Through the bars, he said, "You did the right thing."
She said nothing.
She lived to be eighty years old and never married. Every fall, she would go and sit under the maple trees at Yale. Someone asked her why she liked maple leaves, and she said they were beautiful.
No one knows why.
