Amber’s mouth went dry. It was a long moment before she could put breath behind her words. “I don’t understand. My grandfather was married to Jinju?”
Charlie nodded. “Just a few months after I married In-Na.” He leaned back, his gaze going misty. “You should have seen them. They glowed with happiness. They were best friends. The same interest in history, the same love of music. They were inseparable.”
Darkness edged in on Amber, and she fought it off. “But how about Constance?”
He looked at her in confusion. “What about Constance?”
The illogic of the question made Amber’s world tilt. “Well, he was already married to her.”
Now it was Charlie’s turn to stare at Amber, his mouth first opening, then closing.
When at last he spoke, his tone was cautious. “You mean Constance never told John the truth?”
Amber’s fingers clenched and she put the photograph down on the bench so she wouldn’t damage it. She drew in a deep breath, slowly letting it out again. She strove to keep her voice even. “If you are saying there was something important that Constance would have eventually shared with her son, my grandmother died from food poisoning when John was seventeen. A neighbor brought her over a few cans of tomato sauce she’d made herself and something about how the jars had been sealed was not right. My grandmother was in agonizing pain for four hours before she succumbed.”
Her gaze drifted to the lighthouse. “John was a junior in high school when his mother passed. There were no other family members to take him in. He was forced to drop out of school and work at the local mechanic to pay for food and heat.”
Charlie paled. “I’m so sorry. I had no idea.”
Amber gave a soft shrug. “He’d been ready to drop out anyway, or so he says. Fortunately, the house was all paid for so there were just the utilities and groceries. And a year later my mom, Nascha, moved in with him. She was a clerk at the local grocery store.”
She twined her fingers. “I guess they tried for kids right away but it didn’t work. Years went by. They had given up when my mom finally got pregnant back in ’86. My dad was thirty-eight by then.”
Charlie looked down. “Like the parallel.”
Amber blinked. “Yeah, I guess so. I admit I don’t know too much about Korea. I think maybe because my Dad was so obsessed with it that I stayed away from it out of spite. Most of what I know comes from M*A*S*H reruns and the hero in the Spenser for Hire novels. I don’t even know how the war ended.”
Charlie chuckled at that. “Ended? It hasn’t ended.”
Amber stared at him in surprise. “Wait, what? I thought it ended back in 1953 or something.”
He shook his head. “A cease-fire was called, and a demilitarized zone was created, roughly along the 38th parallel. But no actual peace treaty was ever signed. Technically, the two countries are still at war.”
Tension coiled within Amber’s heart. She’d never been in a country at war. She looked around her at the smiling tourist faces and the trio of selfie-girls by the lighthouse.
She shook her head, correcting herself.
Not a lighthouse. A fake. An imposter.
Charlie’s eyes shadowed. “I’m sure you’ve heard the news reports. Families torn in two with half living in the north and the other half in the south. Up to three million North Koreans starving to death in the mid-nineties. And at the same time, South Korea becomes an industrial powerhouse. Did you know South Korea now has the eleventh-strongest economy in the entire world?”
Amber had seen the soaring skyscrapers and the highways full of expensive cars during her travels from the airport. She nodded.
Charlie reached out a shaky hand and took hers into his. “So you can see why, when Jinju was taken by the North Koreans, that Shash was desperate to get her back. He would have done anything to keep her safe. Given his own life.”
Amber’s heart was in her throat. She pushed away thoughts of her grandfather’s bigamy and focused in on the events. “Did he give her life for her? To save her?”