That bothered him almost as much as did the fact that his mother was a murderess, Reiko saw. “But she finally told you the truth. If she’d done so sooner, you might not have had the spirit to work as hard as you did to save us all. Things might have turned out for the worse.”
Sano was silent, frowning, resistant. Reiko could guess at part of what troubled him, even if he wasn’t conscious of it. Throughout their marriage she’d constantly ventured beyond the limits of what society deemed acceptable behavior for a wife, a woman. Sano had continually stretched his own limits because he loved her, he wanted her to be happy, and he’d often benefited from her actions. But it was harder for Sano to live with the fact that his mother-the woman sacred to him because she’d borne and raised him-had also defied convention, broken the law.
“She begged me to forgive her,” Sano said at last. “I want to, but how can I?”
“You’ll find a way,” Reiko promised. “Because you love her, and she loves you, and she’ll do everything in her power to make it up to you.” Reiko thought of herself and Akiko, of her and Sano’s past quarrels. She believed that forgiveness was always possible where there was love.
Sano glanced at her. “I forgive you for being right,” he said with a wry smile.
Reiko smiled back, glad to see his sense of humor returning. “That’s a good start.”
He rose, gazed off into space, and Reiko saw his thoughts take a new direction. He said, “Not all my mother’s family can be dead. I vaguely recall hearing of the Kumazawa clan. Somewhere out there is a whole set of relatives I don’t know.”
“They know of you. Everybody does,” Reiko said. “And I’m sure they know that you’re from their clan. My intuition tells me that somebody among them has kept track of your mother all these years. And since you became the shogun’s investigator, then the chamberlain, they’ve been watching you with much interest.”
Amusement crinkled Sano’s eyes as he turned to her. “If your intuition says so, then I’d better believe it.”
“Why don’t you look them up and meet them?” Reiko said. She thought of the blood that joined her children and husband to their yet unknown family, the tie buried forty-three years ago and exposed by the murder investigation. She saw much uncharted territory yet to explore.
Sano’s expression showed reluctance, and perhaps qualms about how he would be received by the people who’d disowned his mother. “Not now. I have too many other things to do,” he said with an air of gladly dispensing with personal matters and moving on to business. “Yanagisawa isn’t going to cooperate with me for the good of the country. He’ll oppose everything I do. And the political scene is still in flux. Who knows how many allies will fall on his side and how many on mine? People are already taking bets on which of us will win.”
Reiko sensed his excitement and eagerness for the challenge. “There’s bound to be more crises, more treachery,” she predicted. She rose and stood close beside Sano. Together they looked at the blossoming cherry trees, at Masahiro and Akiko running under the snowfall of pink petals. Their gazes focused on the future.
Sano said with relish, “This should be the dirtiest fight ever.”