For all the resolve you showed our parents, you broke down in our room. You wondered out loud if you were making a mistake, sighed that you would miss him, but it would be too much to marry him, to move to a place like Hong Kong, wouldn’t it? No, you would not leave home again, would not leave us, would not upend your life all over again, even if it meant living through another war. No, it was not possible, even if you already missed him.

You were depressed for days. It was your turn to write our story. You wrote nothing. Sometimes you made an effort to pick up a pencil, to tap at a newspaper article. Most often you were distracted by the contents of the articles—tales of savings suddenly meaning nothing, reports that there were now seven hundred trillion yuan in circulation, compared to only a few trillion a year ago, the never-ending string of suicides, businessmen found dead at the feet of Shanghai skyscrapers.

Your boy and his family, like many other families, left suddenly. Only a day passed between when he asked you to go with him and when his family fled. They owned significant land throughout Shanghai. We had all heard the horrifying stories of what had been done to landowners in the countryside.

“I wish,” you told me one day, “that he had left me something to remember him by.”

How could I deny you after such a direct wish? Every day I wanted to burn his notebook, but every day there were people at home, whether it was our mothers, my father, or you. You were so miserable, I reasoned, that even if I had wronged you by stealing the boy’s pencil, perhaps I could start making up for it by admitting what I had done and sharing the Reforging.

And so I willingly gave the notebook to you. You read it slowly while I waited on my bed, wishing I could disappear from the room.

“How did you get this?” you asked, your voice betraying nothing.

I explained the trick.

“I wish I hadn’t done it,” I said honestly. “I was so angry. I felt so left out, like you had abandoned me for this boy you barely knew. But after I Reforged it, I understood. It was between you and him, and I shouldn’t have tried to meddle. I did it because I loved you, really.”

You closed the notebook, gripping it tightly. His words, gone through my body, into your hands.

“You know what your most outstanding trait is?” you said, your voice eerily even. Then your eyes, dark and unreadable, locked on mine. Like it was only ever you and me.

“Your ability to lie.”

You walked out of our bedroom, slamming the door shut behind you.