The screen flickered intermittently, skewered with white pixels. His phone was irrevocably broken now, so he could no longer trust what he saw on it. Maybe that was for the best.
There was no longer any doubt that the text was meant for him. But James was dead, so either his ghost was trying to scare Lee from across the sea... or someone else knew what he’d done.
Lee jammed a hand into his pocket for his Ativan beforeremembering it was gone. A wave of nausea nearly brought him to his knees, his breath coming too fast, his hands and feet prickling with numbness. He imagined himself being arrested, his father watching sadly as he was handcuffed and forced into a police car. It would be the last time he saw his father because the stress would surely kill him. He wouldn’t even be able to go to his father’s funeral—he would be locked up in a straitjacket because he couldn’t control himself, because he killed but didn’t know why. His life was over, and all he could do was sit around and wait for the end.
Lee shut himself in his room so no one would see him when he couldn’t hold the pieces of himself together. He dropped heavily onto his futon and clutched his pillow to his chest, wishing he could smother himself out of existence.
He lay there for what felt like years, drowning on land. Gradually, his body started to thaw, feeling returning to his fingers and toes. He picked up his broken phone and looked for the text that was no longer there, and maybe it never had been. He was still detoxing, after all. His imagination was too vivid; his father had always said so. It was just a manifestation of his guilt, because who else could have known what Lee’s mother said to him every night in his dreams?
The light shifted beyond the window, glaring off a small, round circle on the floor. Lee reached out and scooped up the two halves of Sen’s broken sword guard. He clutched them to his chest, letting the coolness of the metal spread through his bones. He pressed one half to his forehead and felt all his nauseous thoughts congeal, slow, dissipate. When he felt like he could breathe again, he uncurled his clenched fingers and lay on his side, staring at the sword guard, then up at the dark closet door.
He realized then that morning had bled into afternoon, but Sen had not returned.
Lee sat up and pressed his fingers against the thin paper ofhis closet door, slid it open and shut, pressed his cheek to the cool cement—anything to make the wall yield and reveal Sen behind it.
A dark part of his mind whispered that Sen was never coming back, that he had dreamed up every single moment of her existence, and part of him believed it. How could he not, when the cement wall was here and Sen was not? His mind was a labyrinth of lies.
He closed his eyes and tried to call forth the image of the beach, the world of ashes, the suitcase—anything but the four walls around him in the room of a ghost. But he could only imagine the interior of a suitcase, where it was dark and impossible to breathe. At least here, there was no one looking for him, hunting him for what he’d done.
He left the house, walked past the well in the northern yard, and headed for the sea.Devour me, he thought.Take this nameless feeling inside me. Take all of me if youhave to.
He got as far as the rocks before the ocean met him. It was high tide, and the sea had stolen the shore away, leaving nothing but black water all the way to the horizon. It reminded Lee of the sea he had navigated with Sen, but that too felt so far away that Lee wondered if it had happened in the real world or inside his mind.
The ocean lapped over his feet, shocking his toes with cold, driving away the last vestiges of panic.
Twice now, he’d wandered out to the sea when he couldn’t open the door to Sen. Both times, the sea had risen all the way to the edges of the property. Twice, he’d returned once the sea retreated, and each time he’d found Sen.
He pulled out his phone and looked up the high and low tides for Kagoshima. Just as he’d suspected, low tide had come around 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. three days ago and was drifting later by an hour or so every day. He pulled up his spreadsheet andchecked the times he’d been able to pass through the door. Every time, they matched low tide within a matter of minutes. Whenever he’d found the door closed, it had been near high tide. For some reason, Lee could only cross into Sen’s world when the sea was far away.
But what did the ocean have to do with death?
Maybe death was like an ocean, he’d once said to Sen.You’re under the water, reaching for the surface, and I’m on the shore, dipping my hand into the sea.
But if he’d stumbled upon a truth with that offhand remark, then wouldn’t the door have opened at high tide, when the sea swelled to the edges of the property lines? If the door only opened when the sea disappeared beyond the horizon... then maybe the sea was what held the door closed.
Dread bolted through Lee as he thought back to his visit to the hotel in Cambodia. Had it been high or low tide when he looked for his mother? Would she have been there waiting if he’d only come at the right time of day? He’d realized far too late, and now his mom was a thousand miles away.
The ocean lapped up to Lee’s ankles, cold water stinging his legs as if mocking him. He stepped back until the ocean couldn’t touch his feet.
“You won’t stop me,” he whispered across the sea. “I don’t know why you want to, but you can’t. I don’t answer to you.”
The water lurched as if reaching out for him, but Lee had already turned and headed back toward the house. He imagined the ocean chasing after him, flooding the gardens, waves lashing up to the porch, but he refused to turn around.
He’d expected to spend today with Sen, so now he felt unmoored as he drifted back home. He stepped onto the southern porch, where Sen had killed a man. Even when she wasn’t here, her ghost haunted him.
He knelt on the porch and ran his fingers over the spot wherethe spy had bled, but he couldn’t discern even the ghost of a bloodstain. Of course, blood could be cleaned away—Lee knew that very well—but something about the unbroken color of the polished wood floorboards seemed to mock him. It did not look like a place where someone had bled to death. The only proof of it was locked inside Lee’s mind, a place so dark that Lee himself couldn’t navigate it.
He thought of the text from Not James that may or may not have existed. If that could be a drug-induced hallucination, who was to say the dead spy wasn’t one as well?
Or maybe Sen herself?
Lee clenched his teeth against the rising wave of panic. There were still places he could find proof to anchor him.
He walked to the shed, where his father had put all the tools he’d used when moving in and hanging up shelves, things he’d never taught Lee how to use because Lee was a shadow, not a man. He pushed aside the toolbox and ducked under cobwebs until he found the shovel leaning in the corner. Hina had hoped to plant a garden but hadn’t yet gotten around to it because of the heat, so her shovel sat unused in the dark. Lee picked it up and slung it over his shoulder, then headed into the forest.
Sen had taken him on a strange path through the trees last night—Lee hadn’t missed the way she’d hesitated at every turn, how she’d led him through untrodden soil, tripped over branches and roots as if unfamiliar with them. It was not the way she normally walked out to the river, he could discern that much. She’d glanced uneasily to her right as they’d walked, where Lee saw that the earth was darker, freshly turned over, devoid of plants. Dirt had stained Sen’s clothes, was stuck under her fingernails, and of course, the body was gone. She’d obviously dug a grave she hadn’t wanted him to see.
Lee reached the fork in the woods where Sen had turned left, and he turned right instead.
