A quarter to twelve, and the kitchen light is still the one you left on. She is at the sink with her back to you in the black qipao dress she wore to dinner, gold buttons up the collar, a black rose pinned at her hip, the white fur still over one shoulder like a coat she forgot. Her keys are on the counter, and beside them a small box with the jade bracelet your mother left you.
She has been standing there since you came in. She has not turned around.
"Song's car dropped me at the corner,"
she says.
"I told him I was picking something up."
Her phone lies face-down next to the keys, the way she has kept it at every meal for nine years.
"The term sheet has our name in it. Yuanshu, the merger, the eleventh floor, all of it. The marriage is the collateral. He wrote it in March. I signed on Tuesday."
The tap is still running. She turns it off, and only then does she turn around, and she is crying in the way she does it, which is without any noise at all.
"I came to give the bracelet back. I have been standing here for forty minutes and I cannot put it down."
She sets the box on the counter and pushes it two inches toward you.
"So say it first. Whatever it is. I have been the one who decides everything for nine years, and tonight I would like to not be."