“The house,” I say, too weak to lift my arms all the way, so I nod toward the TV screen instead. “Everything’s ruined.”
“It’s just a house. You’re safe and I’m safe.”
“But it was ourhome,” I say, my voice breaking. It’s not just the house I’m grieving. It’s my childhood, the last happy memories I had of my family together, burning into rubble. Now my dad’s gone, and the house is gone, and I guess my childhood really is over. I was never going to save it in time.
Even if it hadn’t burned... there’s simply no way to return to what it was before.
“I’m really, really sorry,” I tell her.
“Stopapologizing.How is any of it your fault?” my mom demands. “If anything, I should’ve known... you tried to warn me about Long Ge,” she says, her complexion paling further. “Ever since they told me what happened at the house, I’ve been thinking about it. At the party, you tried to warn me. And I didn’t listen.”
“To be fair, he was your old friend,” I say softly.
“Barely,” my mom says, shaking her head. “We weren’t even that close in high school. He wasn’t close with anybody—he was picked on a lot by the other kids. Mostly they tried to humiliate him, but sometimes they got violent with him too. They’d challenge him to fights he could never win, and theynever played fair. That’s how he got the scar on his cheek. One of the older boys had brought a knife to the fight and...” She trails off, wincing at the memory. “I felt sorry for him, especially after that fight, so I would try to be nicer to him. Invite him to join me and my friends for lunch if he was alone. Smile at him when I saw him in the corridors. I suppose I was the only person he could have considered a friend at school, but I never thought much about it. I certainly wouldn’t have thought it’d end up like this.”
“That’s just... that’s so sad,” I whisper.
“Which part?”
“All of it. Everyone.”
“It is,” she says, folding her hands on her lap. She touches the empty space on her ring finger, a phantom feeling maybe, an old habit that hasn’t died yet. “When he reached out after the divorce, it surprised me, but I—I didn’t suspect anything, when I should have.” Her fingers curl. “Instead I just let myself enjoy his affection and attention and all the shiny business opportunities he was offering me—”
“You needed someone. I get it,” I say.
“But you needed someone too. You needed me,” my mom says, and I feel my throat burn with the truth of it. Because even when I’d conditioned myself to need nobody, Ididneed her.
“Mom, I—” My voice cracks over the word, a sob rising inside me.
“Shh. It’s okay, come here, baobao,” my mom says, drawing me into a tight hug. I breathe in the familiar floral notes of her perfume. Chanel No. 5, the same as my own. I’d alwaysloved the smell on her, had begged her for my first bottle on my fourteenth birthday. “Ba ni xia zhao le ba?”You were scared, weren’t you?
This whole time, I’ve been trying to keep it together, to act like a grown-up who knows exactly what to do, to be there for my mom. But now, the last of the fight in my body shatters. Of course I was scared, terrified out of my mind, terrified still, and I’m clutching her, sobbing, nose running, while she strokes my hair.
“Don’t worry about the house. We can always build another home,” my mom says softly.
I sniff. “It won’t be the same, though.”
“It won’t be,” she agrees. Doesn’t try to convince me it’ll be better, but somehow, that’s what calms me down. Her acceptance of it. I can’t bring myself to do the same, not yet, but in time—who knows?
And for now, I bury my face against the soft fabric of her shirt, and I cry and I cry and I no longer bother pretending, and it’s weirdly cathartic, to justfeel,even if the feeling isn’t pleasant.
“I’m here,” my mom murmurs. “I’m here.”
So I guess not everythingis ruined. Say there was a version of the future where the house had burned, but my mother had also been trapped inside. Or Ares hadn’t come to save me. Say that had been the original vision all along. What I did couldn’t have been utterly futile, then. I couldn’t stop the future in its tracks, but I could change it, even if only by a little. That matters. It all matters.
“How are you feeling?” Ares asks for the seventh time the next morning.
“Not too different from when you asked just a few seconds ago,” I tease him.
“Just checking,” he says.
I shake my head. “You know, I don’t think I’m used to you like this. I didn’t know you could be this nice.”
“I’m not this nice to anyone else.”
“I know you’re not,” I say, smiling as I stretch. “It’s just kind of a culture shock. Maybe you should throw in a few insults, help ease me into it.”
He shoots me an incredulous look from across the room, where he’s peeling an apple for me with a pocketknife, his fingers fast and steady, the strips of skin falling away like crimson ribbons into the plastic bag spread underneath it. Now that his little brother is resting at home, Ares has basically been living inside the hospital. And despite my half-hearted insistence that I don’t need him around to take care of me, I’m grateful he’s here, grateful for the time that we have alone together, at last. “Are you asking me to insult you?”
