Chapter Twenty-Eight Sen
Lee’s father packed all of Hina’s food into plastic boxes and gave it to Sen. She took it to be polite, and because she understood
being ashamed of one’s family, and because she couldn’t say that she would be dead in two days and had no use for this much
food when she could never explain to her father where it had come from.
Lee’s father said something to him in English that Sen didn’t understand, but Lee’s frigid expression told her he wasn’t pleased.
He turned back to Sen.
“I’ll walk you home,” he said.
“Come back anytime!” Lee’s father called, waving to Sen, his expression strained.
They left through the front door, then snuck around the house and sat on the porch, waiting for Lee’s father to go to bed.
“I’m sorry,” Lee said. “I never thought Hina would do something like that.”
Sen shook her head. “It’s fine. My family has done worse.”
This seemed to be the wrong thing to say, because Lee tore his gaze from the moon and looked sadly at Sen instead.
Maybe it was because she’d never seen anyone else with eyes the color of sword ferns, but his gaze unmade her every time, like he was cataloging the colors of her soul.
No matter how carefully he controlled his expression, his eyes told Sen his secrets.
In that moment, they were balanced on the knife’s edge of something very important.
After a moment, Lee dropped his gaze and held out his hand. “There isn’t much time left,” he said, the unsaid for you hanging in the air. “I still need to find my mother.”
“Right,” Sen said, ignoring the way her chest ached at his words, like all her ribs were spearing through her lungs. “Of course.”
She held her breath and slowly set her hand in Lee’s. His fingers closed around hers—tight, as if bracing for pain.
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’t see me,” 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 in front 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.”
“I promise,” Lee said easily, tucking the note into his bedside drawer, his expression gray as his gaze drifted to the closet
door.
“I’ll come back tomorrow,” she said.
Lee shifted uneasily, his arms prickling with goose bumps. “There would be no point,” he said, staring at the floor. “We can’t
search for my mother anymore. You’ve done all you can for me, as you promised. You don’t have a debt to me anymore. Please
know that.”
Sen swallowed hard, tears burning at the back of her throat. Lee was releasing her, even though he didn’t have to. He would
have been well within his rights to demand they keep trying until he found his mother.
“I will come back tomorrow,” Sen said again, firmer this time. “I want to.”
Lee looked up, his green eyes bright with surprise. “I’d like that,” he said quietly.
Sen turned to leave, but the floorboards creaked as Lee followed after her.
“Sen.”
Sen looked over her shoulder. Lee had drawn closer, his hand reaching for her sleeve but not quite touching.
“Do you want to know how you die?” he said.
He had asked her that question the first time they met, but this time, his tone was colder. His eyes blazed like he was begging
her to say yes.
“I know how I die,” Sen said.
Lee pressed his lips together into a tight line, looking away. “What if there was a way to prevent it?”
Sen turned fully around. “What are you talking about?”
“You need to leave the house,” Lee said. “Tomorrow, you need to leave and never return.”
He reached for her, but Sen drew back against the closet door. “I already told you. I won’t leave my father to fight alone,”
she said.
“Sen, he won’t fight alone,” Lee said. He moved forward and cupped her face again, but this time his fingertips stung like
fresh ice against her jaw. “You should leave tonight.”
“I told you,” she said, “I...”
The words fell away from her as Lee’s last sentence played back in her mind.
He won’t fight alone.
He’d said it with certainty. As if he already knew exactly what would happen.
Sen shoved Lee’s hands away from her face. “What do you know?” she said. When he wouldn’t meet her gaze, she took another
step forward. “Do you know how to save my father?”
Lee swallowed, taking a faltering step back. “Your father can’t be saved,” he said, “but you can.”
“ If my father dies, then so do I! ” Sen said. A forest fire blazed beneath her skin, her pulse hammering in her ears. “How can you not understand that?”
“Sen, I want you to live!” Lee said. He reached for her again, but she shoved him back against the wall, her hand clamping
down on his throat. Even now, he couldn’t hear her.
“You want me to live for you !” Sen said. “So that you’re not alone. But what about what I want? Do you care about that at all?”
She loosened her grip against his throat, but he didn’t try to deny her words, his eyes bright with fear. Perhaps she saw Lee Turner, but he clearly couldn’t see her .
She released him, stepping back. “I would rather die for my father than live for you,” she said, the words as cold and heavy
as stones plummeting to the bottom of a dark river. “Goodbye, Lee Turner.”
“Sen, wait!” he said.
But she hurried through the door and slammed it behind her. He knocked on the door, but she shoved her dresser in front of
it. Eventually, the knocking quieted, and she could pretend there was nothing there but an empty closet.