Chapter 2

George's hand tightened hard around Miriam's.

He stared at me, his voice a little hoarse.

"Where did you dig up all this nonsense? Your parents have been dead for twenty years!"

"You're not well right now. Stop dredging up the past and torturing yourself with it."

I stepped forward and grabbed him by the collar.

"All you have to tell me is this. That night, what exactly did you do?"

George's hand shot up and seized my wrist, gripping hard.

"Your house caught fire. I ran into the flames and carried you out on my back."

"Have you forgotten how much smoke I breathed in, how long I lay in that hospital? And now you come at me like this?"

I snatched the family photo off the cabinet and smashed it against the wall. Glass shattered across the floor.

"Odie!"

George crouched down and reached for me.

I shoved him away and knelt on the floor, digging through the wreckage for my parents' photo.

The broken glass cut my fingers, and blood dripped onto the picture.

His face darkened. He caught my hand and pressed a handkerchief to the wound.

"Are you insane? Just stop hurting yourself, all right?"

Miriam stood a few steps away, her face ghostly pale.

"George, tell the truth."

"If Odie's got it wrong, explain it to her."

George kept his head down, bandaging my hand, and said nothing.

I thought of every anniversary of my parents' deaths, how he got up before dawn.

Sweet hot chocolate, a savory scallion pancake. Never once forgotten.

One year a storm broke over the cemetery. I collapsed with a fever, and he carried me down the hill on his back.

He sat with me all night in the emergency room, then went back alone the next day to gather up the offerings the rain had scattered, piece by piece.

I used to take all of it for love.

Now all I wanted to know was what he had really been thinking, kneeling beside me at my parents' graves.

Miriam came over and tried to help me up.

Her sleeve slid back, baring the burn scar on her forearm.

Back at the orphanage, when someone came at me with a kettle of scalding water, she was the one who threw herself in front of me.

Once, when her appendix ruptured, I sold the silver locket my parents had left me to pay her medical bills.

Later a family was willing to take me in but wouldn't take her, and I chose to stay too.

We'd promised each other then. Neither of us would ever leave the other behind.

I pulled away from her hand, and Miriam froze where she stood.

George looked at the blood on the floor and finally spoke.

"Yes. That night, I was right outside the back door of your parents' breakfast shop."

Miriam's head jerked up.

But I couldn't hear anything at all anymore.

"I smelled the gas, strong. I used the spare key you gave me and opened the door."

"Your parents were on the kitchen floor. They were already unconscious, but they were still breathing."

"I meant to run to the corner and get help."

George bowed his head, unable to look at me.

"But then I remembered. That afternoon your parents had told you they were moving you to another city and forbidding you to see me again."

"I thought, if they were gone, you wouldn't leave."

"So I took that spare key, walked to the mouth of the alley, sat down on the steps, and waited twenty-six minutes."

"In the end I still called for an ambulance."

"But by the time it came, they'd already stopped breathing."

I slapped him across the face.

I yanked at his hair, clawed at his neck.

"Why didn't you get help? Why didn't you save them? You animal!"

I was crying so hard I couldn't breathe.

George didn't dodge. He let me hit him.

In the end he crushed me against his chest, holding me tight so I wouldn't fall onto the glass.

"I was only eleven! I was just a kid!"

"I had no idea what twenty-six minutes meant for a person's life!"

"For twenty years I gave you everything I had, just to make up for that one mistake!"

I bit down on his shoulder and tasted blood.

"What makes you think twenty years of making it up to me is worth my parents' lives? Why didn't you tell me the truth?"

His eyes were red, his voice trembling.

"If I'd told you, you'd never have spoken to me again. And I couldn't stand you looking at me like I was your enemy."

Miriam, who had stayed silent all this time, suddenly spoke.

"George… is all of this true?"

George didn't answer.

Miriam didn't try to make excuses for him. But where she thought I couldn't see, she quietly took his hand.