Chapter Twenty-Five Lee
Sen shoved Lee away.
She crashed to the ground, scrambling away until her back hit the closet door. Her gaze darted around like a trapped animal
until it focused on Lee. They watched each other from opposite sides of the bedroom, gasping for breath, their heartbeats
hammering at the same frantic pace.
“Lee,” Sen said unsteadily, “I saw—”
But Lee shook his head, holding a hand up to quiet her. He folded forward and gripped his hair, feeling like he had become
his own puzzle, and if he didn’t hold tight to himself, he would fall to pieces.
The memory of James had to be a lie.
James had never been to Cambodia, at least not with Lee. It had to be a false memory, something stirred up in the chaos of
his mind, stitched together by fear and desperation to make sense of something awful.
Lee tried to dig through his memories, imagining James standing on a beach in Cambodia, swimming in the dark waters, climbing the guava trees.
He could picture it, but in the same way he pictured old television shows, peered at them through a dusty layer of glass and static because they weren’t actually happening, they were someone else’s story but not his.
He needed more information.
He grabbed his phone, trying to look up James’s profiles to see if he’d posted any vacation pictures in Cambodia. But James
either wasn’t on social media or wasn’t using his real name, because none of the five hundred James Baldridges online were
the right person.
Lee wanted to strangle Sen for pushing him away. What more could he have seen if he’d stayed in the secret room of his heart
just a moment longer?
“I have to go back,” he said, turning to Sen.
Sen paled. She shook her head slowly, backing up against the wall. “I can’t,” she whispered.
“You can’t ?” Lee echoed. It felt like Sen had struck him across the face with the blunt side of her katana. “What do you mean you can’t ?”
“I saw something awful,” Sen whispered, her face ashen. “I can’t go back there.”
“What did you see?” Lee said, crawling closer. She flinched as he laid his hand on her knee, but he didn’t notice.
She let out a long, shuddering breath, then at last she met his gaze. “Your mother found me,” she said.
Lee’s grip tightened on Sen’s knee. He didn’t realize he’d moved closer until Sen crushed herself even farther back into the
wall. “Did she say anything?” Lee asked.
Sen dropped her gaze to her lap. Her hair fell in a soft curtain around her face, shadows shielding her eyes. “No,” she said.
“I’m sorry, Lee.”
Slowly, Lee drew back. The wind rushed through the empty space between them, a low and mournful sound.
Lee settled into the square of moonlight on the floor and laid his hands gently on the tatami mats, trying with all his might to ground himself here when all he wanted was to dig to the core of the earth, to feel its raw, pulsing center even if it seared his hands down to the bone.
If he gave in to the feeling, he would unmake himself.
“What do you hope to find?” Sen said quietly.
Lee frowned. “The truth,” he said, for what felt like the thousandth time.
“But what do you hope the truth is?” Sen pressed.
If he hadn’t been so distracted, Lee might have found this question strange. But his mind was full of wasps, and he noticed
nothing at all.
He didn’t have to think hard about his answer—he’d known for years. “I hope...” he said quietly, dropping his gaze to the
floor, “I hope that the sun was very bright, and that she was squinting as she looked at the sunset, so she never saw the
man coming for her. I hope he hit her once in the head with something heavy—maybe a rock, or a hammer—and she died in that
moment before she knew what was happening, just looking at the sun. Maybe he was part of a human trafficking ring, or just
a regular serial killer, it doesn’t matter. He hadn’t meant to kill her that fast, or maybe not at all, so he rolled her away
in a suitcase and threw her body out to sea. We never found her body because lots of fish ate it, which sounds awful, but
in some ways it’s beautiful. Like life goes on because of her. Like she’s part of every ocean I’ll ever see.”
“That sounds nice,” Sen said, though the words sounded so hollow that Lee didn’t even acknowledge them. Sen sat up a little
straighter, fingers worrying the hem of her skirt. “And what will you do if that’s not the truth?” she asked.
Lee frowned, tearing his gaze from the moon and turning to Sen’s dark eyes.
It wasn’t the question that was important, but the way she’d asked it—it was too delicate, too fearful, as if his answer was of great importance.
She’d kept her expression carefully blank, but her fingers trembled as they tugged at the loose sleeves of her clothes.
Before Lee could answer, someone knocked on his bedroom door. Lee straightened up, wondering if he should tell Sen to go outside,
but before he could, his father slid the door open.
“Oh,” Lee’s father said, blinking at Sen before quickly gathering himself and smiling. “Hello, Sen.”
Sen bowed, and Lee was grateful that at least this time, she wasn’t holding a sword.
“I came to tell you that Hina needs help with dinner,” Lee’s father said to him, “but how about I take care of that, and you
stay here with Sen?” He turned to Sen. “Would you like to eat with us? Dinner will be ready in twenty minutes.”
Sen shook her head quickly. “I wouldn’t want to trouble you.”
“It’s no trouble,” Lee’s father said. “Hina makes too much food for just the three of us.”
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.