“That boy again,” my mom mutters under her breath, but she doesn’t stop me from moving to his side, which I’m taking as a good sign. Improvement. She’d been too preoccupied to recognize Cyrus as my childhood enemy at my cousin’s wedding, but she’d definitely noticed him when she’d gone to pick me up at the airport. Likely because he was holding my hand. I’d spent the entire car ride home explaining to her that we were good now, that he was and always had been good, really, I swear, he made me happy. And just when I thought she might accuse me of losing my mind, she’d simply smiled in a resigned sort of way.

It all sounds very bizarre to me, considering how much you hated him before, she’d confessed as the car crawled along the highway, but I can tell you’re happy, which is what matters most. She’d glanced at me again in the rearview mirror. Something’s different about you, baobei—I can feel it. Just like how before you left, I could tell how unhappy you were. You hid it well enough, but your smiles were always forced, your laughter strained. It’s like you were making yourself go through all the motions without feeling anything, and I … I couldn’t bear to see you that way. Now, though, she said softly, when you talk about him, when you talk about Shanghai … Your happiness is real. It’s practically radiating off you.

That was three weeks ago.

Three blissful weeks, and the happiness has stayed, made a home inside my heart. With every day that I’ve spent with Cyrus since, I’ve uncovered something new about him. I learn all the books he keeps on the shelf beside his bed, Chinese and English titles mixed together, his favorites annotated so thoroughly he might as well have written another novel within the novel. I take note of the bag he carries to school these days—cream canvas, sturdy, practical—and the expensive fine-liners he keeps in his pencil case, his only “luxury purchase.” I laugh at his playlist the first time he drives me home (Cyrus, what kind of retro shit is this?), but he knows I’m just teasing and he knows exactly how to shut me up, because when he parks two houses down the street, he gazes over at me in the darkness, and his hands find the nape of my neck and he pulls me toward him. Pauses for a few seconds, simply holding me there, until I think my heart might explode and his lips finally find mine with that awful retro song still playing in the background, but it’s sort of grown on me by the time we reach the last chorus.