Luckily, there is no rift between me and Monica. It may even have brought us closer, now that I understand her. What’s done is done, yet it feels as if I have not learned anything at all after all these decades. How the pencil can hurt as much as it can heal.

This is the first time I wish you had given me more than your pencil. How about a phone number, Meng? Do we not live in the twenty-first century? I am very good with a computer; an email address would have been fine as well. A few days ago, I would have agreed with you that this way of sharing our feelings is better, more accurate, more intimate. But when the news is urgent, this hardly suffices.

There is something circular about this, that you should be the only person I know other than Monica who has met this girl, Louise. And if I had an immediate way to contact you, I would grill you—is she nice, is she caring, is she going places in life? Monica likes her in a way I would not have fully comprehended had I not Reforged her pencil. And I need to know that this person would treat her well, because I won’t be around much longer. I need to know she will be happy and safe.

I want everything in the world for her. I want her happiness so much that sometimes I wake at night, gripping my blankets so tightly my fingers cannot unclench. I don’t deserve any wishes granted—you know that better than anyone—but every one of my memories would be a trivial sacrifice to ensure this future for her.

Have I said this before? It runs through my mind all the time. I’ve been tossing pages I wrote, pages I realized were repeats or not about our lives at all. It will be a tremendous task to piece together all this nonsense I’ve written. But I believe you’ll understand me because we have been through too much together—and it all started when you had to change your name, when we became sisters.

It was an attempt to distance us from our fathers, who at the time were fighting against the Japanese. It would have been impossible to account for two missing men, so your mother became childless, a woman staying with her sister, and Mother became a widow whose husband died years ago, before the Japanese had ever come to China, and you became my sister.

“I’ve only seen your younger daughter during the last few years,” a neighbor might say, suspicious of our family. Why had he never seen you before?

“She was sickly, and it was difficult to care for two children without my husband,” Mother explained carefully. “I had to send her to my sister.”