Mei set down her chopsticks. Warm fair skin, brown eyes steady, long glossy black hair down for once instead of clipped. "I'll live with sharp pieces if you keep telling me which ones cut."
"That's the deal," Marcus said. "No more secret bleeding."
They did not kiss over the table like a movie. They shared the last dumpling like people renegotiating a treaty with soy sauce. Outside, under a streetlight that still flickered — or a descendant of the old one — Mei took his hand. Marcus let her. The city sounded the same. They did not.
Summer heat arrived with soccer tournaments and lemonade and the discovery that Nora had begun to notice how other families arranged themselves. At a teammate's birthday she overheard two mothers discussing "the Reeds' situation" in the tone adults use when they believe children are furniture. Nora came home and asked Mei if situation meant divorce.
Mei sat on the floor of Nora's bedroom among stuffed animals and told her the word divorce was a legal door some families walked through and some did not. "Daddy and I walked up to that door," Mei said. "We looked through it. We are choosing, for now and for as long as we both keep choosing, to stay on this side and fix the floorboards."
"Are the floorboards us?" Nora asked.
"The floorboards are trust," Mei said. "You are the reason we care if the house stands."