"You okay?"
The question is quiet. Stripped of the banter. Delivered in the register Jace reserves for moments when the performance drops and the real conversation begins.
I sit beside him. Lean forward. Press my elbows against my knees and stare at the polished tile floor between my sneakers.
"I left her, Jace."
"Your mother left her. You were sixteen. You didn't have a choice."
"I could have found a way. You got an explanation. She got nothing. Eight years of nothing. And she just looked at me and called it 'poofed,' like it was a magic trick instead of the worst thing I've ever done to another person."
He is quiet for a moment. The comfortable quiet of a man who knows when to speak and when to let the silence carry the weight his words cannot.
"Then tell her the truth," he says simply. "Over lunch. All of it. What your mother did. Why you couldn't reach her. How much it ate you up. Let her decide whether it changes things."
"What if it doesn't?"
"Then you'll have given her honesty. Which is more than she's had from you in eight years."
I nod. Slowly. The guilt does not dissolve, but it shifts. Rearranges itself into a shape that is less crushing and more manageable. The shape of a task rather than a sentence. A conversation to be had rather than a weight to be carried indefinitely.
Tell her the truth. Let her decide.
It is the least she deserves.
Twenty minutes pass. Jace and I argue about whether ramen or sandwiches are the superior lunch food while our stomachs compose increasingly aggressive letters of complaint to our central nervous systems. I am mid-argument about the structural superiority of a properly constructed Tonkotsu broth when Mae emerges from the administrative office, student ID in hand, looking slightly dazed by the efficiency of bureaucracy that functions as advertised.
I jump to my feet.
"Finally! I was starting to think the paperwork ate you."
"It tried." A small smile, tentative but real. "But I escaped."
"Our hero." Jace unfolds from the bench, stretching his arms overhead. "Now, can we please go eat? My stomach is starting to file complaints."
"Says the guy who mocked Mae's stomach literally twenty minutes ago."
"I apologized! And besides, my stomach is much more dignified. It doesn'tgrowl. It makes polite requests."
"Your stomach made sounds like a dying whale last Tuesday during Professor Chen's lecture. The entire back row heard it."
"That was a cough."
"That was your intestines staging a protest."
Mae laughs.
Not a polite laugh. Not the restrained, calibrated exhalation that people produce when they want to participate in humor without committing to genuine amusement. A real laugh. Full-bodied and bright, erupting from her chest with a force that makes her eyes water and her shoulders shake.
The sound hits my ears and detonates a warmth in my chest that I was not prepared for.
That laugh.
I have not heard that laugh in thirteen years. The laugh she used to produce during sleepover pillow fights and movie marathons and the three-AM conversations where we talked about everything and nothing and the future felt like a place we were building together instead of a destination we would reach alone.
"There she is," I hear myself whisper. "There's the Mae I remember."
She catches the words. Her laughter trails into something softer, something that settles between us like a shared breath. Her hazel eyes meet mine, and for a moment, the guilt and the years and the distance collapse into a single, fragile bridge that is not strong enough to walk across yet but is real enough to see.
