They did not remarry because they had never divorced. The legal papers stayed in a drawer in Marcus's apartment, unsigned, a possible future that lost urgency as the months stacked into something like a second courtship. Mei asked him, on a rainy Thursday, if he wanted to come home for real — not for dumplings, not for weekends, but for the ordinary mornings when Nora spilled cereal and the coffee maker complained and the upstairs bedroom held early light instead of early ruin.
Marcus stood in the kitchen of the house they had bought with hope and nearly lost to a forgotten shirt. He looked at Mei — slim, glossy black hair clipped loosely, dusty-rose replaced that day by a gray sweater, small gold earrings, brown eyes that had learned not to hide. He looked at his own hands, deep brown, wedding band present, athletic fingers that had packed a bag and unpacked a life.
"I want to try," he said. "Not erase. Try."
"Trying is all I have," Mei said.
Nora appeared at the top of the stairs in socks. "Are we a family again?"
Marcus and Mei looked at each other the way they had in Oakland twelve years earlier, before they knew how many ways a family could break and still refuse to finish breaking.
"We're working on it," Marcus said.
"That's a yes in grown-up," Nora decided, and came down the stairs two at a time.