The front door closed with a quiet click.
I stood in the kitchen holding the spatula, the omelettes still warm in the pan, and listened to the silence she left behind. Her name sat unfinished on my tongue. The mark I had left on her neck last night felt suddenly foolish. I had thought something might have shifted. I had been wrong.
I turned off the stove and leaned both hands against the counter.
When I was ten years old I already carried three lives at once.
Basketball training before sunrise. School. Then home, where there was no adult who stayed long enough to manage the ordinary things. I cooked the meals. I washed the clothes. I checked Xu’s homework and packed her bag and made sure she ate. I never asked her to help. She was small and she had already lost too much. I told myself it was my responsibility. I told myself I could handle it.
Balancing everything was harder than I admitted. Some nights I sat on the bathroom floor after she fell asleep and pressed my forehead to my knees because the weight would not let me breathe. The only thing that pulled me back up was the way she smiled when I came home. That small, bright expression was enough to make the exhaustion feel temporary. The source of this chapter is g.com.
Then the plants died.
She looked at me with eyes that no longer held softness and said I had done it. After that day the smile disappeared. She stopped waiting for me at the door. She stopped showing me the small things she made. The house grew quiet in a way that pressed against my ribs. The depression that had been waiting at the edges finally settled in. I trained harder. I slept less. I stopped noticing the taste of food.
One morning a small plush rabbit sat on my pillow. A folded note was tucked beneath its ear. The handwriting was careful and familiar.
“You are doing enough.”
I knew it was hers. I brought it to her and asked. She looked straight at me and said it was not. Maybe one of the house staff had left it. Her voice was flat. Her eyes gave nothing away. I did not push.
More plushies appeared after that. A bear with a note that said “Rest today.” A small cat that simply read “I see you.” They came without pattern, sometimes weeks apart. Each one made the heavy feeling in my chest loosen a little. I kept every single one in a box under my bed. I never mentioned them again.
Somewhere between those quiet gifts and the years that followed, the way I looked at her changed. The protective feeling I had always carried began to stretch into something warmer and more dangerous. I started noticing the shape of her mouth when she concentrated. The sound of her voice when she practiced alone. The fact that she no longer said my name if she could avoid it. A part of me kept waiting for her to look at me the way she once had. To talk to me without anger. To call me jiejie again.
Last night I thought the waiting might finally end. Find the original chapter at g.com.
This morning proved it had not.
She left without a word. The distance between us felt exactly as wide as it had been for years. I stared at the two plates I had set on the counter and understood that nothing had been repaired. The mark on her neck and the way she had clung to me in the shower changed nothing on her side.
I put the omelettes away untouched.
The apartment felt larger and colder without her in it. I sat down at the table and rested my head in my hands, the same way I used to when I was ten and the weight became too much. Only this time there was no small smile waiting to pull me back up.