“You can see me?” I ask in surprise.
“No. I sensed your presence.”
I frown. “Well, that’s not good. If people can sense when I’m here, I’ll need to fix that before tomorrow. Work on masking my steps better, or moving more slowly, or...”
But he’s shaking his head before I’ve even finished my sentence. “That’s not what I meant,” he says, then pauses, seemingly searching for the right words. “It—it’s only because... I’m around you so often. I highly doubt anyone else would be able to.”
“Ah,” I say, though I’m still unsure what he really means. All I know is that if Henry’s being this ineloquent, maybe he’s even more stressed than I realized—but about what, I have no clue either. “Well, then. Seeing as I came all the way here from my carriage, are you going to be a gentleman and offer me a seat or what?”
“Oh—yes. Of course.”
He moves over to make room at once, and I sit, but alarm flashes through me. I’ve never known him to be this compliant before. Something’s definitely wrong.
Still, we are both silent for a while, listening to the steady snores of the two businessmen and the creak of the train tracks below, before I finally muster the courage to point out the obvious. “Not to sound like the school counselor or whatever, but you don’t seem like your usual self today.”
“My usual self?” he repeats, eyebrows rising.
“You know—your superpretentious, unnecessarily formal, annoyingly arrogant, walking-advertisement-for-SYS self.” The intended insult comes out sounding much more affectionate than I wanted, so I add for good measure, “You even stumbled over your words when you were talking just now.”
Horror clips his tone. “I did not.”
“You did,” I say, mock-serious. Then, with sincerity: “So. Do you see my cause for concern now?”
“I suppose. I just...” He smooths out a nonexistent crease in his shirt, then says, with all the tones of someone making a terrible, humiliating admission: “I’m...not exactly a big fan of enclosed spaces.”
“Okay,” I say slowly, trying hard to think of what to say next. Because if this really is an admission, it means he’s trusting me with something private, something precious. And god help me, for whatever reason, the last thing I want is to ruin it. “Okay,” I repeat. “Do you want to talk about why...?”
“Not in particular, no.”
“Oh.” I clear my throat. “Well, all right then.”
A long, awkward silence ensues, and I’m starting to worry this conversation is over—not that I enjoy talking to Henry Li or anything, it’s more the principle of the matter—when he sucks in a tight breath, the way you would before ripping off a Band-Aid, and says, “It’s...quite silly, really. And it was a very long time ago—I couldn’t have been more than four or five. But...”
I wait.
“At our old house in Shunyi, there was this room in the basement—well, not so much a room as a closet. There were no windows, nothing except a door you could only open from the outside. I remember... I just remember it was always cold in there, and dark, like the mouth of a cave. My mother wanted to leave it for the ayi to store her cleaning supplies, but Father thought it’d be put to better use as a...study space.” His jaw tightens. “So every day, at precisely five in the morning, he’d leave me in there with only a book of practice questions and a pencil for hours.”