His father’s car peeled out of the driveway, leaving Lee folded over a fern bush. It was as if the dirt from the grave-that-was-not-a-grave had rendered Lee invisible. Slowly, he rose to his feet, checking to make sure he wasn’t in shock and somehow hadn’t felt his feet or hands getting run over. But all his fingers and toes worked, and the feeling thundering through him as he walked unsteadily back home was not shock or adrenaline but rather an unbearable weight, an anchor dragging him to the bottom of the sea.
Lee locked the bathroom door and turned on the shower. He stopped short at the sight of his reflection. Dirt stains marredhis shirt, the shadows beneath his eyes, the corners of his lips. He imagined the edges of all the stains bleeding together, devouring him.
Lee Turner was a stain on his father’s life. And while Lee couldn’t look away from stains, his father couldn’t see them at all.
He scrubbed every trace of sweat and dirt away, and by the time he was clean and dressed, his father had returned from his errand. He smiled at Lee as if nothing at all was amiss, then hid himself away in his office. Lee would never tell him what had happened.
As Lee tossed his muddy clothes into a hamper, a strange sound came from the kitchen. Lee wiped off his hands and followed it.
Hina was sharpening the kitchen knives. To Lee, the knives already looked impossibly sharp, but Hina kept sharpening them as if she planned to cut stones in half rather than potatoes. The bright sound of the sharpener flayed his mind with every stroke. It reminded him of Sen unsheathing her sword, the burning taste of iron raining down over him and filling his mouth. He needed Hina to be quiet. She would know that he was annoyed when she looked at his face, and she would stop because she always knew what he wanted.
Lee stood in the doorway of the kitchen and waited. After a moment, Hina’s hands slowed and she turned to look at Lee, setting down the knives.
“You want tea?” she said, smiling. “Dinner won’t be ready for another hour.”
Lee nodded and sat at the table. The tension left his shoulders now that the sound had stopped. Hina prepared his tea and passed it to him, then put away the tea tin and turned back to her knives.
“Aren’t they sharp enough?” Lee said, unable to hide the edge to his words.
Hina pretended not to notice it. “They haven’t been sharpened in a long time,” she said.
A coldness yawned open in Lee’s chest, numbing his lungs, crawling up his lips and stealing his breath. Lee felt all at once that he shouldn’t have been in the kitchen. He had wandered into the wrong house, the wrong kitchen, the wrong chair. Then air whispered over his shoulder, and suddenly he understood the problem.
The back door was open.
Lee rose to shut it, but without even turning around, Hina spoke.
“Leave it open. I was cooking pork and it got smoky in here, so I need to air the room out.”
“It doesn’t seem smoky anymore,” Lee said, hoping that would be a good enough reason, but Hina didn’t reply.
Lee sat, but his gaze drifted to the bright rectangle of sunlight in the doorway and his bones began to itch. He wanted to unpeel himself, remove every eyelash, every fingernail, every tooth. He couldn’t stay here.
He stood, trying to pick up the tea and hurry out of the room as quietly as possible, but Hina spoke first.
“I know you’re keeping a secret,” she said.
Lee froze. Hina hadn’t turned around, was still sharpening her knives, but now it felt like she was scraping them through the seams of his brain. He stared at the rigidness of her shoulders. It was so hard to read people when he couldn’t see their faces.
“I’m not,” Lee said, taking care to sound firm.
Hina shook her head. “You don’t have to tell me,” she said, her voice softer, “but if it’s something that upsets you, you shouldn’t be afraid. I’ll always help you.”
Lee felt frozen in place, unable to sit back down or leave, one hand on the cup that was starting to burn his palm. Hina meant well, but she was wrong. He could never tell Hina about James, and certainly not about Sen.
It was easy enough for Hina to be patient with her boyfriend’s eccentric son, but it was another thing entirely to defend a murderer. Maybe she thought she loved Lee, but she didn’t know him at all. All of her cooking and storytelling was no more than a careful dance.
Lee hadn’t realized until that moment how fragile his entire life was. One wrong word, and he would lose Hina, his father, his freedom. He was standing in the middle of a frozen pond and it was cracking under his feet.
“Thank you, Hina,” he said carefully, “but I’m fine. Really.”
Hina hummed. She didn’t believe him, but it didn’t matter. He was doing her a favor.
He took his tea to his room and sat on his futon, staring out the Sometimes Window rather than looking deeper into his own mind. He could hear Hina’s heartbeat in the kitchen and his father’s heartbeat in his study, but they felt a thousand miles away. Lee was alone in the house.
The tea went cold in his hands, and the shadows shifted as the sun moved across the sky. He lay in bed reading until light finally bloomed behind the closet door. Lee stared at Sen’s silhouette, the soft folds of her robes, the edge of her sword, the way her hair shifted as she tilted her head to the side. He could hear her heartbeat too, in sync with his.
In two days, she would die. He imagined her shadow fading until there was nothing but darkness behind the door—the only door that he’d ever wanted to remain open. He rose to his feet and opened it.
