His eyes are exquisitely dark, desolate. “But I keep thinking that if only I had—I don’t know, maybe everything would have turned out better. I wouldn’t have made things so difficult for them. They argued about me more than they argued about any other topic. Whether I should be spending more time practicing piano, or if I was spending too much time on the piano. Whether I should sign up for summer camp or stay home, and if I did, then who was going to cook for me and look after me. Whether I should pick Chinese or French as my language elective. And it might seem ridiculous, but part of the reason why I want to get into Stanford so badly is because that was one of the only things they ever agreed on. It meant something to them. I still remember sitting with them on the couch together one night, and it was so … unusually peaceful. They were both in a good mood for once, and my dad was holding my mom’s hand, and we were sharing these bowls of roasted sunflower seeds, and they started talking about the future … They met at Stanford, you know that?”

I shake my head, wide-eyed. “No. I didn’t.”

“Yeah, when they first started dating, my mom was getting her PhD—her mentor at the time was Dr. Linda Shen, who was basically my mom’s idol—and my dad was getting his master’s degree because he’d taken some time off from his studies to work. So they were both telling me about it, how beautiful the campus was, the places they’d go to get lunch together, and my dad said he thought Stanford would be perfect for me. It was close to home, and familiar, and it’d be, like, this family thing, if we all went there …”

That’s why. Now it all makes perfect, painful sense. The determined glint in his eyes whenever he spoke about Stanford, the strange intensity in his voice, even his obsession with getting a recommendation letter from my aunt. It’s not just about his dreams for the future—it’s his dreams for his family.

“I keep imagining it,” Cyrus says, swallowing. “I imagine calling my parents to tell them I was accepted, that Dr. Linda Shen herself wants me at Stanford, and they’re both so excited about it that they start talking to each other again, and maybe they remember how and why they fell in love in the first place. Maybe then … Maybe I could fix it.”

“Cyrus, that’s—” My voice catches, and for some reason, I feel like I could cry. “It’s not up to you to fix your parents’ marriage.”