I looked at Mother. She was writing furiously. Her tears were for the company, I realized, the one she had built, nurtured, and that was suddenly, thanks to you, gone. I did not feel the same sense of loss she did.

You cut off a means for the Chinese officials to spy on its people, at least temporarily. I was in awe of you, as I always have been. All I had done in my time away was ruin a relationship and dutifully aid the Nationalist cause.

“I saved that pencil for you,” Mother told me. “That one is Meng’s.”

I wasted no time Reforging it. You wrote that you and your mother were feuding, that she had changed since we left. She had fully embraced Communism and that whenever people were around, she spoke endlessly about your father and his sacrifice for the Communist party, even though she had hardly talked about him when he was alive. You said she had come to believe in her work helping to uncover insurgents. You did not believe they were really insurgents though. The Chinese government had flagged three things as signs: corruption, waste, bureaucracy. But anybody’s words could be twisted and labeled as these, you argued.

How I wish I could have kept your letter to show Monica. You framed the problem and the gift of the pencils so clearly. They can unearth lost stories. They can breach privacy. They allow an intimate connection between the Reforger and the writer. They can revive something that never wanted to be revived. It was the kind of thing we never thought about when we were young and Reforging felt like a superpower.

The note ended with a sentence I will never forget.

Come back for me.

It hurts me to write those words, because we both know that I never did, even though in that moment, I absolutely resolved to, you must believe me. I knew that if you wanted me to save you—you who so desperately longed to be rooted in place—and had resorted to burning down the home we both loved, it meant the situation was dire. Words concealed within our already concealed words.

It was as if a fog had lifted. I could see the situation clearly, practically, and everything told me I needed to leave. But the only voice I could hear was Torou’s, saying America was the place to be free. China would not welcome us back, and Taiwan would not accept you and your mother. America was the only place we could all be together.

Should I swallow my pride and beg Torou to take me with him? I cringed even thinking about it, reaching out to him only because I knew he was going to America.