I opened the car door to show I was done arguing. For a moment, as I walked toward our home, I thought she would drive away. She finally climbed out of the car.

“You know where the room is,” I said as we took off our shoes. I headed to my room. I heard her follow me up the stairs.

“Monica.”

I had avoided looking at her since the hospital. Her shaking voice forced me to face her now. She stood in my doorway. I could hear grandfather’s snores from the room next door.

“Yes?”

When she did not say anything, only continued to stare at me, opening her mouth, then closing it again, I turned away from her. I opened the top drawer of my desk and pulled out the pencil that had started it all.

I had almost all the facts. How Louise truly felt. Why grandmother felt so guilty over Meng. There was just one part of this story I had not heard yet, one point of view whose lens was the last one I needed to make a rational decision.

I pressed Meng’s heart into my wrist.

All I could see was white, my room gone, replaced by a lack of vision and a spiking pain. The other pencil heart had not felt remotely like this. Grandmother had warned they could be painful. Even so, I had not expected this much. There was something piercing in my head, as if a high-pitched scream, and my fingers were in my hair, clenching, grabbing. The scream contained words, I eventually sensed, too high and garbled for me to comprehend, for me to do any more than to catch a few here and there when the ache did not overwhelm.

Gradually, as the pain subsided, I could see my room again, registered the pink carpet rubbing against my cheek, recognized Louise kneeling beside me, her hand on my back, as I regained control of my breathing.

The words were clearer now. It was something about Shanghai, something about—could it be?—my father, and finally, in a flash of light, Louise, so clear that I could not tell if the Reforging had ended right as I saw the real Louise in front of me.

“Was I screaming?” I asked.

“More like whimpering,” she said. “I closed your door so your grandfather wouldn’t wake up.”

“Thank you. I’m fine. You can go to sleep now.”

“Don’t you need to Reforge?”

“I can do it while you’re sleeping.”

“I . . . could help you though.”

I sat up. The room became clearer still. Our eyes met, and I could see each red vein in hers, the dark circles around them.

The calm fled at this point. She was confusing everything I thought I knew. Perhaps she did care for me, after all? Then she glanced at my arm, at the darkened phoenix, ready for its rebirth, and everything clicked.