In front of MAE.
Heat floods my cheeks with the speed and intensity of a chemical fire.
"I did NOT."
"You absolutely did. Your mom sent my mom pictures. I have receipts."
"Those pictures were doctored. Fake news. Slander."
"Sure, babe."
"Don't 'babe' me, Nakamura. I will end you."
The verbal tennis match continues at pace, and I can feel Mae watching us with an attention that warms my peripheral awareness. She is studying the rhythm of our exchange, mapping the dynamics, filing away data points the way she used to catalogue figure skating scores and teacher comments and every micro-interaction in a room with the quiet,exhaustive thoroughness of someone whose survival strategy is observation.
Miss Phillip clears her throat with the pointed precision of a woman whose patience, while considerable, has structural limits.
"As delightful as this reunion clearly is, I do need to take Ms. Rose to finalize her paperwork. The administrative office closes in an hour, and I'd prefer not to have her wait until tomorrow."
I deflate. The manic energy sputters like a flame losing oxygen.
"Right. Yeah. Sorry."
"Can we wait?" Jace steps forward, his teasing persona softening into the genuine, attentive mode he conceals beneath layers of sarcasm the way I conceal softness beneath profanity. "Outside the office, I mean. We wanted to catch up with MaeMae here, and we haven't eaten lunch yet."
Miss Phillip considers, then nods.
"That would be perfectly acceptable. The administrative office is in the east wing, third door on the left. There are benches outside where you can wait if you wish."
"Perfect." I turn to Mae, and the expression on my face feels foreign. Vulnerable. The kind of naked hopefulness I have not allowed myself to display since I was a teenager, before the rejections and the disappearances and the systematic education in disappointment that my mother's lifestyle provided free of charge. "Is that okay with you, Mae? We can catch up after you're done with all the boring official stuff. Get some food. Talk about everything that's happened since..."
The sentence trails into the space where the wordssince I vanished from your life and let you believe it was by choiceshould go but cannot because my throat closes around them like a fist.
"...since I disappeared."
The guilt flickers across my features before I can smother it. I see Mae register the flash, her hazel eyes widening by a fraction as she reads the pain beneath the word and understands, perhaps for the first time, that my disappearance was not a decision I made but a sentence I served.
Her stomach growls.
Not a polite, modest gurgle. A full-throated, animalistic roar that erupts from her midsection with the acoustic intensity of a garbage disposal processing a spoon. The sound ricochets off the corridor walls and reaches my ears with enough volume to qualify as a medical event.
The hallway freezes.
Mae's face achieves a shade of red that I did not know human skin was capable of producing.
Jace snickers.
My hand connects with his bicep before the sound fully escapes his mouth, the smack echoing through the corridor with a satisfying crack.
"Shut up! Don't tease her for being hungry!" The protective instinct surges through me with a force that predates adolescence, drawing from the same reservoir that powered every playground confrontation I ever fought on Mae's behalf. "If I was hungry, I'd already be kicking your ass."
"Ow! Okay, okay!" He rubs the impact site, his grin fighting through the wince. "Sorry, MaeMae. That was rude. My apologies to you and your very vocal stomach."
"I hate you," I inform him.
"You love me."
"I tolerate you at best, and right now we're dipping into 'active dislike' territory."
