Her question was genuine. I think she really believed she was helping create a better China, and who am I to say that she wasn’t? It was 1950, a new decade, and yet nothing had changed. We were coming up on our second year in Taiwan. My father’s promise of a few months seemed a lifetime ago. I didn’t care for the Nationalists or the Communists. I wanted to be free of it all, the same as Torou, and you only wanted a place to call home, regardless of who was governing it. Our mothers longed for stability and the most straightforward way to achieve that was to support the government. If the Nationalists could not form a unified front, there would be no hope of driving out the Communists, or returning to China, returning to you.

What little news we received from Shanghai was dire. We heard about the forced confessions of business owners, how everyone was once again paranoid, trying to sniff out any capitalist leanings among their neighbors. That in itself was frightening. But then there was the matter of the pencils. They were uniquely suited for this kind of work, spying and revealing. It was possible you were doing the same thing we were doing here. You would have an opinion, I knew, about whether it was noble. You would not merely acquiesce as I did. You would take action.

I dreaded Reforging Torou’s pencil, worried it would be like that time I stole your boy’s pencil and Reforged it, saw and felt those things that were not meant for me. Torou might reveal some truth he felt about me—that he hated me or, even worse, that he loved me. Both options terrified me. But I had to do it so there was no chance his words could ever be discovered.

It turned out I was self-absorbed even in my paranoia. He wrote nothing about me, only math equations. A slanted, efficient handwriting, numbers and symbols that I could not begin to understand. He wrote with a mix of care and excitement and—at the very end—a fullness, a satisfaction, an appreciation that could only be described as love.

Afterward, I lay on my bed and raised my hand toward the dark-paneled Japanese-style ceiling. My phoenix black against my skin, the way it was after Reforging, made vivid by his words. For that moment, I let myself admire the minimal lines, the way his heart filled in my scar. I wrapped both arms around myself. That was what his love felt like, I thought, smiling.