Lee thought of half a dozen excuses he could have made for Sen, but he knew his father would keep insisting until Sen herself refused. And of course she would—why would she want to spend one of her last days alive here, with his family? Not to mention Hina, who acted so strangely around her. Sen would run back through her door and shut it behind her, like always.
“I would be honored,” Sen said at last.
Lee turned to Sen in disbelief.
“Great!” Lee’s father said with a grin. “I’ll go tell Hina.” Then he turned and headed back to the kitchen, leaving the door open behind him.
“You don’t have to stay,” Lee said under his breath once his father was out of sight. “I can make an excuse.”
Sen shook her head. “I can’t look at my family right now,” she said. There was something oddly fragile about her words, but Lee didn’t know how to ask about it. “Besides,” Sen said, “Hina wouldn’t do anything strange in front of your father, would she?”
“No, probably not,” Lee said. He decided not to press further because he knew the unspoken rule that you let dying people do whatever they wanted, no matter how strange.
Still, Sen’s unanswered question hung in the air.
What will you do if that’s not the truth?
Lee pretended he’d forgotten Sen ever asked. He didn’t know the answer, and he was afraid to find out.
It was standard dinner fare for Hina, but Sen looked as if she’d sat down at a royal feast.
Hina had filled the small kitchen table with fish cakes, beef stew, ginger eggplant, pickled plums, miso soup, and rice topped with sesame seeds.
As Sen ate, Lee wove a story for her.
Sen was studying classics at Kadai and had taken a semester off to care for her father, who was sick. She lived in her grandmother’s house in Chiran. Her mother was a seamstress, who made her lots of kimonos that she liked to wear in the summer, since she didn’t wear them during the school year.
They’d met in the market on Lee’s first day in Japan, when he’d gone to get a SIM card and almost knocked her into a drainage ditch by accident. She was angry at first, of course, but she was surprised he could speak Japanese so well (this part of the story earned him a glare from Sen) and they started talking about all they had in common. The lie was easy, and his father hardly blinked as he told it. But Hina stared at him with her lips pressed together, her gaze unwavering.
All the pieces fit so nicely together that for a moment, Lee forgot it wasn’t real. Why couldn’t he be the kind of person who stumbled into good things instead of tragedies? Why couldn’t he and Sen have met in this life, instead of her real life, where she was doomed? If Lee imagined hard enough, he could believe it.And as he watched her eat her rice too quickly and cough some of it back onto the plate, he found it endearing, and he allowed himself a single moment to fully believe the lie. A world where he’d never killed James, where he was only visiting his father, where he had a friend and not a ghost, and hope instead of fear.
But Hina wouldn’t let him believe it.
“I thought they got rid of the classics program at Kadai last year?” Hina said, looking to Lee’s father.
Sen stopped chewing her fish cake, looking to Lee.
“Yes, Sen will have to choose a new major soon, unfortunately,” Lee said smoothly, sure that Hina could hear his racing heartbeat. What, exactly, was he so afraid of? Hina would never guess why Sen was really here. “She’s working with her advisor to figure out what to do,” he said.
Sen nodded. “I’m interested in poetry.”
“A beautiful art form, but not a lot of money in it,” Lee’s father said, smiling.
Hina said nothing for a few moments, and Lee hoped, naively, that she’d drop it.
“I should have made more food,” Hina said. “I didn’t realize your girlfriend had five times your appetite.”
“Hina,” Lee’s dad snapped.
Sen ducked her head and slowly set her soup bowl down.
“I’m sorry,” she said to her lap.
“Sen, you eat as much as you want,” Lee’s father said, still glaring at Hina. “We have plenty of food here.”
“That doesn’t mean it’s polite to eat like a starving wolf.”
“Hina,” Lee said, the word a low warning. She looked up sharply, as if she hadn’t thought Lee would speak against her. She flinched away from his glare, turning back to her own plate. Lee prayed that was the end of it.
