Chapter 29

chapter 29

When June and I arrive,we know the drill. She’s waited for me at the gate even though we’re not officially speaking. “Dad.” June phones him as soon as I disembark. “We’re here.”

It’s funny. No matter how successful June becomes or however many ride sharing apps spring up, Mom and Dad will forever insist on picking her up from the airport. It’s my first time coming home from college, and the irony doesn’t escape me.

Today is the day I became an adult because I had to get picked up by my parents.

The trick is, we have to exit from the second floor in departures. That way they don’t have to spend money on parking. That’s the deal. The great hack.

We step out into the muggy night. The air’s bloated and cloudy with mist and the sky is navy and huge. I breathe deep. Even with the blond woman smoking a skinny cigar next to us by the no smoking sign, the air is incredible. It’s rich and earthy, almost as if it had to travel great distances to arrive at my nose. It smells as if the sun’s still out. I take off my puffy coat and wad it into my bag.

I search the ramp for their car.

The quiet is deafening. As though the sky is filling my ears with huge nothingness and swirling into my brain. A half-terminal away, Dad’s rectangular Volvo headlights glow larger. I know it’s him because he also has his fog lights on. The shotgun-side door opens and shuts in shadow, as Mom’s tiny silhouette hops out while the car still rolls.

“Jesus.” We both say it. At the same time.

This is everything you need to know about our mother. That she’d exit a moving vehicle because she believes she’s faster on foot.

“Is this it?” she says as a greeting. She’s so much smaller than I’d remembered. And she’s dressed in a pink polo with a popped collar and black slacks. It’s not only the glasses that have changed, but her hair is different, pulled back in a black scrunchie. I feel unnerved by the changes. As if my nostalgia’s been fueled by the wrong information.

My sister bear hugs her and gets in the car. “What do you mean ‘Is this it?’ The bags or the state of your daughters?” she retorts in Korean. June’s Korean is flawless. There’s something in the age difference when we moved to America that allows her to joke freely with them. Mom and Dad chuckle.

I don’t know that I’ve spoken Korean since I left for college.

“Hey, Dad,” I call out in English to the front seat.

Dad’s wearing transition lenses, so his eyes are hidden when he waves back in the rearview and smiles. “Hello, Jayne,” he responds in English. Then he turns up the stereo. A dulcet, piano-backed baritone fills the car. The lyrics are about some woman crying in a window. I don’t know exactly when, but a few years ago, Dad started humming or crooning all the time. We didn’t grow up with music in the house, but by senior year they’d started listening to Korean songs that someone from church put on a thumb drive for them. Old hits from their childhood or random French tunes, like warbly Édith Piaf. Mom gets hammy for “La Vie en Rose” with her phonetically learned lyrics.

Our mother wordlessly passes back bottles of lukewarm water and a pump-top Purell.

The familiar action pushes up against the pressure already thick and uncomfortable in the back of my throat. The thousands of times Mom has turned to us. Me in the seat behind her, June behind Dad. I’ve missed her so much, I want to crush her in my arms.

I lean back into my seat, the roiling unease building as we climb the highway seemingly to shoot off into heaven. Some people get nervous when they lose their bearings, when they’re out to sea and can’t spy land anymore. That’s how the Texas sky has always felt to me. As if the world is falling away all around me.

It’s not just the sky. It’s the negative space of the quiet, too. I will never be found here. It seems as though there are no other cars on the road. If the world ended, we’d be the last to know. We wouldn’t even know we were lost.

The familiar pyramid bank building with its stacked, setback terraces glides into view on my right. The mirrored Spectrum building that looks straight out of Tron slips by after that. It’s distressing that the architecture of a town where I’ve spent most of my life barely comprises a skyline. A pair of churches that seem to claim no specific faith other than worshipping at the altar of bigness loom ahead.

At home, my true home, in New York, I overhear people complaining all the time about the city, how it’s busy, that the din of traffic makes it impossible to hear their own thoughts. This is precisely why Texas scares me. The silence makes my thoughts too noisy to bear.

I search the horizon. I am only visiting, my brain tells my body. I push my Brooklyn apartment out of my mind. My stomach growls. I attempt to locate myself.

One: highway.

Two: Taco Cabana.

“I’m gonna kill a bean and cheese,” whispers June as the neon sign sails by.

Three: the back of Mom’s perm.

Four: Dad singing.

Five: June looking out the navy-blue window.

This is why I’m here. My sister needs our family. And I am a decoy.

“Get over,” says Mom, patting Dad’s forearm and pointing to the left. “This man has no designs on changing lanes. He’s left his blinker on like a lunatic.”

My mom is the worst back-seat driver. Her road rage becomes truly homicidal when it’s secondhand road rage.

“He forgot he switched it on,” says Dad good-naturedly.

“Impossible. He’d hear it.” She taps my father’s forearm repeatedly. “Okay, now. Get over.”

Dad gets over.

“If this psychopath can pass the driver’s test, you’d think Jayne could pull it together,” says June.

That does the trick. I can sense the tension building in Mom’s knotted shoulders.

The three of us may as well count it down under our breaths: three, two, one…

“Jayne, I bet you could get your license on this trip if you tried,” says Mom.

There it is.

I’d kick my sister if it hadn’t gotten Mom off Dad’s back while he’s driving.

“Dad’s car is for dummies,” says Mom. “It beeps whenever another car’s nearby, and there’s a rearview camera for parking. It practically drives itself. You could do it. It’s so easy. Ji-young, you absolutely cannot let this develop into a phobia.” She says “phobia” in English.

“Fifteen-year-olds can drive, Jayne,” says June.

I search for an ally, but my father’s eyes are impassive in the rearview.

With my screen brightness set low, I check to make sure there are available cars near us on Lyft. I download Uber again just in case. If I need to make a getaway, I can. I go to Patrick’s page and deep-like a post instead of responding to his latest text. I like the way it looks on my phone. That the last text from him was asking whether or not I’d arrived safely. This way I can respond whenever. Plus, I want him to stay worried about me.

I’m bucked by the Volvo’s wheels bumping over the tracks as the gate to our neighborhood opens, and a tightness rushes my chest. The sense memory is almost violent.

When we first arrived from Korea, eighteen hours after we’d left, it had been evening then, too. That first night, in our rental car, a stupidly big SUV, on our way to our new house, we were tired and uneasy. June and I watched silently while our parents fell into childlike helplessness at the car rental place, gesturing, pointing at pictures, broken English clattering conspicuously around them, grinning while muttering gravely to each other in Korean.

I looked out the window as we drove.

I’d never known true night before this; it was so dense and black. The quiet was unsettling, and as we turned off the deserted highway onto gentle pitch-black hills, Dad halted at a stop sign for a long time. I’d thought he’d grasped the full weight of his mistake, but instead he whispered with wonder in his voice, “Do you see that?” He pointed through the windshield and flickered his high beams, and we saw them out there. Their outlines.

“Are those deer?” Mom asked.

We waited for them to pass. “It’s a whole family,” June breathed excitedly. I felt as though the car was running out of air. I couldn’t believe we were expected to make a life here. Out in the wilderness. With literal fucking deer.

The quiet screamed in my head.

When we turned onto our street, our tiny brick house stared back at us with white-shuttered eyes. It looked like a home in a picture book. We thought it was hilarious that it had a real pitched roof, the kind of house we’d only seen in cartoons. It wasn’t until daylight that we realized that our brick house wasn’t brick at all. It was brick veneer. Gift wrapping studded with brick tread that was only a half-inch deep. And our home sweet home was a replica of every third in the sprawling anonymous subdivision erected hastily to accommodate the air force base nearby.

“You haven’t had dinner, have you?” Mom asks, struggling with our luggage. She grabs the suitcases, one in each hand. We know better than to offer help.

“I’m starving,” says June.

“I knew you would be.” Mom climbs the short flight of stairs into the house, sets her shoes aside, and presses the button for the garage door to shut.

I follow them in. The garage opens directly into the kitchen, with a pass-through to the living room and the dining room on the left. I’m unprepared for the smells. I’m viscerally transported by the scent of Mom’s floral perfume overlain with the nuttiness of rice and a metallic whiff of oily fish. I feel my fingernails dig into my palms.

The house is a museum, the bright-white overhead lighting only adding to the ghostly quality. Each stick of furniture is exactly where it’s always been. Chair legs eating into their assigned grooves in the cream-colored carpet, black leather couch settled in the middle, the reclining massage chair in the corner. The enormous lacquered coffee table is covered with a lace tablecloth and a pane of glass sandwiched on top. It’s still there, seemingly petrified. A setting indifferent to its inhabitants, one that will outlive us all.

My eye lands on the kitchen counter, on a rectangular vase that’s filled with easily a hundred pens. I’d bet money that a third have dried out. The vase sits in a shallow wooden tray that also corrals several bottles of vitamins and supplements and a green-lidded square Tupperware container filled with condiment packets. I flip over a blister tub of Smucker’s jelly with a peel-back lid. My parents don’t eat jelly. It expired four years ago. There’s also a stack of Reader’s Digests that have been there since I can remember. I’m tempted to believe they were there when we moved in.

I’ve always associated this kind of light hoarding with being Korean. My parents’ scrupulous scraping and saving was mirrored by every other church family whose homes we visited. Their love of containers. Takeout napkins stacked and socked into holders. Kikkoman soy sauce packets were gold since Kari-Out was watered down. Both were diligently stored. Golf balls were gathered from the green, rinsed and collected. Ingenious contraptions involving clothespins and wire hangers were strung up to dry herbs, vegetables, and flowers.

So many rosaries draped throughout.

“Let’s see,” Mom says, inspecting us as she slips into house shoes. “Are you thinner or fatter?”

She reaches over and lifts my sweatshirt to peer at my midsection. I instinctively suck in my gut and shrink back.

“We’re exactly the same, Mom.” June rolls her eyes and washes her hands in the kitchen sink.

“You should have seen the way your mother started cooking when she heard you were coming, Ji-young,” says Dad, clapping me on the shoulder. “It’s all your favorites. You’d think you were getting married.”

“Nonsense,” says Mom sharply, swatting my father and putting on a green apron. “I’ve been cooking as I normally do. You’re acting as if I starve you. The way I labor over your breakfast, lunch, and dinner. You eat wonderful meals every day of your life.”

“It’s true,” he says, winking over her shoulder at me. “We’re all very lucky.”

“Did you at least make some of my favorites too?” asks June. Mom ignores her.

It’s stifling in here. And loud. Dad’s switched on the TV, a flat Samsung LED the size of a full mattress that’s set to stream Korean television from dubiously legal sites. A US golf tournament in Arizona has traveled all the way to Seoul to be commentated by Korean sportscasters to find my parents in Texas. The origin of the setup is a mystery to me. They can’t restart their router or personalize settings on their phones. June keeps their Apple IDs on a Post-it on her fridge in New York.

I watch June and Dad, framed by the pass-through. It’s as if I’m watching a television show of people watching a television show.

June looks good, I decide. Passably healthy in her trim suit. My hand travels to my stomach, gauging the way it fills my cupped palm.

I tip my suitcase over and unzip it, pulling out a light, cotton house dress. I slip into the downstairs bathroom, closing the door behind me. The light here, too, is unforgiving. I lift the hoodie over my head, turning sideways and tiptoeing to see as much of me in my tank top in the mirror. I pee, engage my core, then look at myself again. I turn to the other side to check the thickness of that arm. I’m grateful that my roomy navy smock has sleeves. I don’t show Mom my arms. I don’t remember the last time she saw my naked body.

And then I do.

Of course I do. Five years ago. My face burns at the memory of the pale-purple silk, crinkly and delicate in my hands. I was swaying side to side. I was too old to be trying on her hanbok. The dress was voluminous, like crinoline, and princessy, with trillions of gathers in the Empire-waisted pinafore. The skirt tied in the back with thin silk strings, and the jeogori—the long-sleeved bolero jacket of the formal gown—tied in front with a full, wide sash. I felt so pretty.

The door opened. I hadn’t heard them come home, hadn’t thought to lock it, and I saw the circle of her pale face in the mirror like a moon hung above my own round face. I have no idea how long she stood there, but I’ll never forget her eyes. They landed on my hands, which held the top closed because it was drawn too tight across my widening back and wouldn’t fasten over my boobs.

My hands drop. Mouth hung open. The moment seemed to smear around us, unending. I was horrified that she’d caught me doing something as silly as dress-up, so obviously pretending to be her and so obviously failing, but part of me wanted to show her. Even lit with shame, I’d held hope. In that beat when no one spoke, I allowed myself to think that my mother might say I looked lovely. That her eyes would soften when she realized how badly I wanted the dress. That I wanted anything of hers.

That’s when she slapped me. Straight across the face with no hesitation as hard as she could.

I dropped to the floor, tasting metal from the force of the fall, still looking at the scene through the glass. I held my cheek, pedaling my sock-clad feet, digging my heels into the carpet so I could get away from her. The layers of skirt crumpled beneath me, dress straps biting into my shoulders. It had to be a misunderstanding. My instinct was to tell her it was me. I heard myself whimpering. Pleading. Imploring her to see. I thought she’d be filled with gut-wrenching regret when she realized what she’d done, when she’d see who I was.

Instead she pointed at me, eyes gleaming, dark as holes.

“You girls don’t get to have everything,” she’d screamed before collapsing onto her knees, hiding her face as she bawled. I had never before seen my mother cry. “Take it off,” she pleaded into her hands, and I did. Hurriedly. Ears ringing.

My fingers were numb and alien as they fumbled with the front sash. I was trying to go fast, desperate not to tear the fabric, reaching behind me to undo the tricky knot in the back. I threw the jacket on her bed, unslung the straps of the skirt. I grabbed my sweatpants and held them against my body, hiding as much as I could. I kept my face turned away.

I left Mom in a heap. Afraid to look at her, desperate not to confront the disgust in her eyes a second time. I was sick with remorse. I was so glad June wasn’t home to see my total humiliation. I closed Mom’s bedroom door in the dark hall just in time to hear Dad close the door to his office and lock it.

Two weeks later, Mom left.

I knew it was my fault, and I didn’t tell June.

When I emerge from the bathroom, sweatshirt pressed against me, Mom’s right there. I startle. I freeze as she reaches over to finger the hem of my dress. “Is this cheap or expensive?” she asks. The truth is that it’s both. It’s from an extortionate Japanese designer. I stood in line for seventy-five minutes to buy it at a sample sale. “Cheap,” I tell her, letting out the breath I’d been holding. I know better than to get into a conversation about how I’ve gotten ripped off.

“Good,” she says. “I was going to say it looks cheap.” Mom ducks her head and licks the fabric. “See,” she says. “The way it discolors when you sweat. It’s not at all practical.” She then scrunches it into a fist to watch it wrinkle. “And it’s so hard to maintain. Is it dry-clean only?”

I have no idea. “No.”

“Because even if it is, I’d bet I could put it in the cold cycle and it would be just as good.” I make a mental note to never change out of it. I can’t give her a chance to test her theory. If it shrinks or discolors, it’ll be my fault. Once she disintegrated a bias-cut silk sundress with straps strung of semiprecious stones and she accused me of wearing clothes that were capricious, unserious. Most of Mom’s theories are like witch trials.

I follow her small shoulders and perm back into the kitchen, wondering how it would feel to be touched by my mother without bracing for criticism.

“Set the table,” she instructs in Korean.

“Thanks, Jayne. I love it,” says Dad, in English. I whip around. He’s holding what appears to be a red, cellophane-covered ceramic golf bag. I’m guessing it’s a mug.

“There are chocolate golf balls and matching tees in the bottom,” says June. I take it it’s from both of us. “Sorry we missed Father’s Day,” she continues. We don’t do Father’s Day. May fifth is Children’s Day in Korea, so we usually do something special for all of us, since Cinco de Mayo is huge in Texas. I widen my eyes at June. It’s insane to me that they don’t see right through her sentimentality.

“Jayne, please,” says Mom, regarding me with impatience. I have no clue how I’ve managed to disappoint her in the last ten seconds. “The table?” she reminds me with a sigh in her voice.

I snap the silverware drawer open. I’m confused by the lack of matching chopsticks. I search around the sink, greeted by the row of inside-out Ziploc freezer bags, handwashed and tented. Their logos have been rubbed off from reuse.

“Dishwasher,” says Dad. I reach in, remembering June’s detergent pods and half-full loads. She’s too busy talking to look at me. I grab utensils, making sure the chopsticks have mates.

Mom posts up in front of the refrigerator, pulling out an infinite number of shallow dishes, setting them on the table behind her as if there’s an assembly line of factory workers inside the appliance handing them out.

“I’m glad you’re home,” she says abruptly. When she swallows hard, I look away.

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I precisely remember the day Mom left. There’s that Maya Angelou quote how people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. For a few hours, I felt my mother’s love for me in a deep and profound way, and then she was gone.

That whole morning had been dreamlike. It was the first time I skipped school, so the day’s events stuck out even before I knew it for the day it would become. I couldn’t believe how easy it was to cut class. I felt stupid that it had never occurred to me to do before. I wonder if that’s how Mom felt when she got to where she was headed. Whether she realized how arbitrary it was to stay in one place when she could just as easily be in another.

She didn’t seem surprised when I walked back into the house three hours after getting on the bus. A girl I’d newly become friends with by our mutual appreciation of thrifted Doc Martens was leaving with her boyfriend, and I’d impulsively asked for a ride. I rode in the back of the truck with my eyes closed.

I came through the front door and was entranced by the aroma of cooked food. The dining table was set, not the kitchen table or the squat, lacquered foldout we sometimes used on the floor, and it was laden with delicious treats. It was as if I were happening upon a cottage in the woods in a fairy tale. I wondered who she was expecting.

I could sense someone in the house, but the TV wasn’t on. I walked upstairs. My mother turned to face me. She looked beautiful in the late-morning light. She was dressed in a white bra and a simple gray skirt, as if she were going to work in an office. I was astonished. It was Mom, but I’d caught her in another life. A secret one. As though she played a mother in my movie, but here I was, watching her in another film entirely.

It had been so long since I’d seen her out of the wrinkle-resistant polyester slacks she bought at Costco. Her hair was pulled back in a silver clip. She even seemed to move differently.

There was an open suitcase on the bed. It was small, bright green. It usually sat on the floor of her closet. The part of the closet I wasn’t allowed in. I knew better than to ask where she was going. She wouldn’t tell me, and I longed to earn her affections for not asking.

She held up a jewel-toned silk square to the light. “Do you remember when you’d use this scarf to make a little boddari?” Even her voice seemed different. Happier somehow. Breathier. “You were always so keen to leave.”

I’d been steering clear of her when it was just the two of us, her rage for the hanbok incident fresh in my memory, the heat still stinging my cheek, but I sensed an invitation. The acknowledgment of a special occasion. A parallel universe. I walked through the portal and sat on her bed, careful not to rumple the clothes laid out there, flattened as if intended for a paper doll.

I was hungry for her to tell me anything. Mom was unsentimental. Heartachingly disinterested in us. Rarely nostalgic. Halmoni was kind when she came. Slipping us crisp banknotes and patting our cheeks as I pleaded with my eyes, questions leaping at my throat. I couldn’t understand why everything was a secret. Why everything I knew about my mom was ill gotten. I spied on her at the organ at church one time as she played a full classical song without making a single mistake, stepping on the pedals at all the right parts. She’d never once played for us before. And I’d seen old-fashioned black silk stockings with a garter belt rolled up carefully in her underwear drawer, hidden away and speaking to a version of her that I’d never know and would never become.

“What is it?” she asked me in Korean.

Mom slipped on a silky ivory blouse. I imagined it felt cool on her bare arms. She was backlit, and even with her C-section scar that I knew was underneath her skirt, I thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world. She’s always been the perfect size. So dainty. The small bones that protruded from her skin were breathtaking. She had nimble hands and tiny feet, with eyes that were the biggest of all of ours even without surgery.

“I almost fainted,” I told her. Quickly adding, “They sent me to the nurse, and she sent me home.” I didn’t tell her that I’d deliberately not eaten since dinner the day before yesterday. That it was an unspoken pact between me and my new friends. Toward the end of freshman year, one of us had gotten thinthinthin. Only I knew her secret. How she ate everything and then un-ate it. Hit reset. We’d never talked about it, but I heard her. And I know she wanted me to ask, so I didn’t. Instead, I’d watch the door in the bathrooms at school, at diners, turning on the tap as a warning when someone else would come in. I ignored the repeated flushing, the sour smell of her hair and her breath. I loved studying her, both of us pretending I wasn’t. Secrets are like wishes. Everyone knows they don’t work if you tell. But if you really want them to gain power, you can’t acknowledge that they even exist.

When Mom left, my secret kept me safe.

“You don’t feel warm,” she said, absently cupping my cheek.

I closed my eyes when she touched me, enjoying the whiff of jasmine and white flowers. I leaned into her cool hand. When I was young, I couldn’t fall asleep unless I was rubbing her earlobe. I still remember how I worried the tender flesh between my thumb and forefinger, the nubbin of ear piercing scar lulling me. June did the same thing, tugging the back of Mom’s neck, but she’d been bumped from our mother’s lap when I was born.

She pulled away and turned to the window. I watched the delicate beads of her spine. I loved observing my mother, as unknowable as she was. The way she held her pinkie aloft while arranging things into a silk pouch, which she laid in her suitcase. I watched myself in the mirror, straightening my posture to appear leaner when I heard the expensive click of the jewelry box.

I tried to guess what she’d select for her blouse, running through the tangle of costume jewelry in my mind, the cold strands of faux pearls, the gold Nefertiti pendant, mysterious amber statement pieces, and the jade bangles stacked on the right. I remember guessing it would be earrings. I was startled when she sat down next to me and pressed a thin gold band with two small rubies into my hand.

I left my fingers splayed as it bore a hole into my palm.

“Pretty, right?”

I nodded. She leaned in. I held my breath as she took my hand in both of hers and folded my fingers in. “It’s yours,” she said.

I slipped it on my ring finger, my wedding finger. My hand could’ve been someone else’s, it was suddenly so beautiful. My fingers had always been my best quality. They are my mother’s exactly. The ring fit flawlessly. I aspired to one day have the rest of me be as pretty as my hand in this moment.

“Are you hungry?” she asked, smiling conspiratorially.

I nodded again.

We headed into the kitchen. I inspected the table this time. Myriad small dishes, jewel-like, glinting under the gloss of Saran wrap. She lifted the steaming glass lids of the largest saucepan. Kimchi-jjigae with fatback. June’s favorite. A black earthenware cauldron of steamed egg. My favorite. There was even mapo tofu for Dad.

She pulled out a chair and served me generously. Not the half servings I’d been getting from her and from all the church ladies who had been forbidden to overfeed me. My weight was a joint concern.

It felt like a fable. The kind where you eat what’s forbidden, where you desecrate offerings to the gods and you wake up squealing, wordless, transformed into an animal, punished for your greed. In Korean folklore, women were mercurial, constantly turning into bears, cranes, or nine-tailed foxes. Sometimes as punishment, sometimes as reward.

I kept eating. Past the point of discomfort. My mother talked about her mistakes and how it would be a sin to expect forgiveness from her girls. I remember thinking that the Korean word for “punishment” was the same as “bee.” I already knew she was leaving, and I ate slower so that she’d stay longer. Part of me ate hoping she’d take me with her. Only me. I ate with the ring held tight in my fist as she extracted the smallest bones of the fish, the tricky feathery ones below the fins, and fed me the meat. And when she told me to go lie down, I did because I was tired. And sick. I could barely lie on my back, I was so uncomfortably, painfully full. I’m not sure I heard the garage door opening, but when I came back downstairs, she was gone.

I still held the ring when I woke up.

I felt as though I’d failed a test. That I’d sold her out for a piece of jewelry. I needed to fix all of these acidic, roiling feelings that arose in me. I needed to undo my mistakes. Be forgiven for my sins. I was desperate to get rid of the salty, unctuous, sick, thick bribe inside me. I pulled the cord.

There was this dream I used to have during those months after Mom vanished. That I was standing up to take Communion in an enormous, Gothic church. It was cold and bright, and I had to climb hundreds of steep stairs into the light. I was always too scared to look down, and when I reached the top, I offered up my hands, one exposed palm over the other, to receive the dried-out wafer of sacrament. And that’s when I’d feel the searing heat of a sting on the outstretched flesh of my palm and watch the bee disembowel itself.

While Mom was gone, I tried rubbing my own ear and was shocked by how loud and insistent it was, how unpleasant. It never occurred to me that she might not be experiencing the exact soothing, quieting sensation I was. I hadn’t known I was a nuisance.

I never told June or Dad that I’d seen her go. It became so clear what she’d meant when she’d screamed “You girls don’t get to have everything,” gesturing wildly to the dress I’d defiled. June stayed up for her night after night, but I knew she wasn’t coming back. And each time Dad called when he thought we were asleep, I lost a little more respect for him. I had seen the look on her face. She’d given me her ring, and I’d betrayed her by taking it. I’d given her permission to leave when my sister or father would have demanded she stay.

When June left, my secret exploded.