“But your father pulled every string he had to convince them you should remain.” He sighed. “I would have liked to have you back on the island.”

The news my father had done something like that for me somehow registered before Mother’s death. Maybe it was more believable or easier to process, though I had recognized my mother’s weakness, seen her shaking hands.

I glanced over at the boxes of pencils. He noticed.

“Those are all the reserves your mother made. They are useless to us back home without someone to Reforge them, so I brought them here.”

That was when I began to cry. He had called her pencils, her life’s work, useless. When he, more than anyone, should have known how special they were. They possessed an unexpected power, one Mother had kept from me until she believed it could help. I first knew our pencils as just that—implements that were a delight to use, with which I could draw and write and even bully you. Mother had sought to better them not for Reforging, but for writing. The people who had bought them, whose eyes widened even in this foreign land when I mentioned I still had some in my possession, who ordered them in bulk when we were children running around Shanghai, had loved them for their comfort and craftsmanship. They were the finest pencils, and that should have been enough.

He patted me on the shoulder, rubbed my back, then left me alone. I wanted him to leave me alone forever, desperately, but even so, this country was so far away from where Mother would be buried, where my father still worked, and even farther from the place I called home, and I was devastatingly lonely. I fell onto my bed, buried my head in the pillow. It no longer smelled like that clean department store. It smelled like me, and I did not like it.

I wrote you a letter that same day sharing the news. I don’t know if you ever received it. I thought of you more than usual that night, wondered if you sensed Mother’s absence in the world. You would have understood what it meant to lose her. You would have understood what it was like to be in a home that was not yours.

That was when I Reforged your pencil. The one with the end of our story, the one you had given me in Shanghai, and that I had carried with me always, knowing I would need your voice someday.

I hadn’t thought of our story in years. I remembered the broad strokes of it, the antics of our characters, but Reforging even just the ending, I was stunned by its darkness, how much the war had warped us. I was only a few years removed from the reality of war, and I could hardly reconcile the violence as something we once thought so commonplace.