But this time, the world did not fall to ashes beneath her feet. The house did not collapse around them. The dark sea did not surge toward them from the horizon. Lee’s pulse hammered through his palm, his grip tightening painfully around Sen’s hand.
“Why isn’t it working?” he said.
Before Sen could answer, Lee yanked her sleeve up to her elbow and grabbed her forearm, the same way he’d held her when she almost fell into the drainage ditch. His grip tightened around her bones, but they both stayed grounded on the porch.
Lee let out a frustrated sound and grabbed her other hand, then her other wrist, sliding his fingers across every exposed inch of skin. Sen let him manipulate her limp arms.
“Lee,” she said quietly, “I don’t think—”
But then Lee cupped her face in his hands, his nails biting into her cheeks.
“It has to work,” he said. The moonlight illuminated a tear that tracked down his cheek, bright as a falling star. “How am I supposed to find her now?”
Sen gripped his wrists, anchoring his hands around her face. “I don’t know,” she said.
For a moment, she considered telling him the truth. Lee felt like flower petals spilling through her hands, like she could barely hold on to him before the wind stole him away. She’d never wanted to hurt him.
Maybe the bridge between life and death isn’t a bridge at all, he’d once said to her.Maybe it’s more like an ocean. You’re under the water, reaching for the surface, and I’m on the shore, dipping my hand into the sea.
Now, here they were, on the surface of the sea, hand in hand at last. There was no more black sea around Sen, no white sky above Lee. Lee’s mother had already told Sen the truth, so there was nothing left to show them, no more secrets to uncover. Sen herself was the secret, the truth that Lee Turner wanted so badly.
But she would never tell him.
This would be her dying gift to him—a world where his mother hadn’t suffered. Lee Turner had no idea what he was trying to unbury.
Lee pressed his forehead to Sen’s, his warm tears now running down her cheeks as well. She tasted their salt as they reached her lips.
“There’s no one left for me,” Lee whispered, so quietly that Sen felt it more than heard it. “My mother is gone, Hina’s gone, and you’ll be gone soon too.”
“Your father?” Sen said.
“Sen, he doesn’tseeme,” Lee whispered, more tears tracking down his face. “If there’s no one who can really see you, it’s like you don’t exist at all.”
“I see you,” Sen said, even though she knew that counted for very little when she was about to die, but she felt she had to say it anyway. Lee shuddered and tightened his grip around her cheeks. “I see you,” she said again, a promise.
I will miss you, she thought.
As soon as the thought rose to the surface of her mind, she knew she was lost. She wasn’t supposed to be attached to anything in this life; she had to be able to run fearlessly toward death. Lee Turner had become her undoing, just as she’d always feared. And yet she couldn’t blame him. The fault was her own.
It was different from the way she’d blushed and felt her heart beat faster around one of the older boys at the samurai academy. Different from when she’d glimpsed one of the more handsome Shimazu sons that her father said she might marry one day, before they’d lost everything. She didn’t want Lee Turner to kiss her, or marry her, or fall in love with her. She wanted him to sit beside her on this porch and watch the stars with her for as long as she was still alive. She wanted to exist beside him, to be real and whole in someone else’s eyes, to bare her soul to someone and have them stay beside her anyway.
She tried to imagine Lee growing older without her, his hair turning the color of moonlight, his skin growing gray and creased. She was the one dying, but he was the one who would be left alone.
She glanced back into the house. “Do you have any paper?” she asked.
The questioned confused Lee enough that he pulled back, halting his tears. “Yes,” he said. “Why?”
“I’m going to write you something,” Sen said. “So you don’t forget me.”
Lee frowned. “How could I forget a ghost in my closet?”
“I don’t mean tomorrow, or next week,” she said. “I mean in fifty years. You could find a story to tell yourself to explain what you saw. But you won’t be able to explain a letter. You’ll remember me, so I’ll still be here. It’s like you told me on the first day—the samurai are remembered, so we aren’t really gone.”
Lee smiled softly. It was the first time he’d ever smiled infront of Sen that didn’t feel like a lie. “Okay,” he said, finally releasing her. He stood up and opened the porch door for Sen, flicking on the light as they both entered his room.
Lee passed her a small sheet of paper and a pen. She knelt on the floor, using her hair to hide the letter as she wrote her note. When she finished, she folded it up tightly and handed it to Lee.
“Read this after I’m dead,” she said. “Not before. You have to promise.”
