A Love Left Behind

Chapter 19 - Rose

I watched him leave.

That was the part Damian never saw.

He turned around one last time before security, lifted his hand and smiled at me.

I lifted mine.

Then he disappeared.

I kept looking anyway.

As if he might come back.

As if he'd suddenly decide Germany could wait.

As if sixteen-year-olds had any control over things like countries, families and ten thousand kilometers of distance.

“He's gone, Rose.”

Kaelob's arm was still around my shoulders.

“I know.”

“You're still looking.”

“I know.”

Alice stood beside us.

She didn't tell me not to cry.

She didn't say it was only a few months or that we'd see each other again.

She simply took my hand.

That made me cry harder.

“Great,” I muttered, wiping my face. “Now I look terrible.”

Kaelob looked at me.

“You looked terrible before.”

I hit him.

“Ow.”

“You deserved that.”

“Probably.”

Mum laughed.

I didn't.

Not yet.

The drive home felt longer than usual.

Kaelob sat in front. Mum drove. I sat behind them with my phone in my hand.

No message.

Of course there wasn't.

Damian was probably still boarding.

I checked anyway.

Then again.

And again.

“You're going to drain your battery by staring at it,” Kaelob said.

“Mind your own business.”

“You are my business.”

“No, I'm not.”

“You're my little sister.”

“That doesn't make me your business.”

“It literally does.”

“Can you both stop?” Mum asked.

We did.

For approximately thirty seconds.

Then Kaelob turned around.

“You know he's coming back, right?”

“You don't know that.”

“He came back this time.”

“That doesn't mean anything.”

“He looked like someone had killed his dog when he left.”

“Kaelob!”

“What? I'm helping.”

“You're terrible at helping.”

Mum laughed again.

I looked out the window.

I wanted to believe him.

That was the problem.

Damian and I had promised not to make stupid promises.

We would try.

That was all.

At the airport, it had sounded mature.

In the car, it sounded terrifying.

Try.

People tried things they expected might fail.

When we reached home, I went straight to my room.

I closed the door.

Then I immediately regretted it.

Damian was everywhere.

Not literally.

He hadn't spent much time in my room.

But there was a photograph of us on my desk.

A stupid one.

Kaelob had taken it during the island trip. I was laughing at something and Damian was looking at me instead of the camera.

I'd noticed that only afterward.

One of his shirts was lying over my chair.

The one I'd stolen.

I picked it up.

It still smelled faintly like him.

That nearly started the crying again.

“This is pathetic,” I whispered.

My phone vibrated.

I almost dropped the shirt.

Damian: On the plane.

I sat on my bed.

Me: I thought you forgot me already.

The answer came immediately.

Damian: It's been two hours.

Me: Exactly. Plenty of time.

Damian: Impossible. You still have my shirt.

I looked at it.

Me: My shirt.

Damian: Thief.

I smiled.

Then another message appeared.

Damian: I miss you.

My smile disappeared.

Not because I wasn't happy.

Because I missed him too much already.

Me: I miss you too.

Three dots appeared.

Damian: We try.

I stared at those two words.

Then I typed:

Me: We try.

That was the beginning of life after Damian.

Or maybe it was simply the return of the life I'd had before him.

Except it didn't fit quite the same anymore.

My name is Rose Tan.

For most of my life, that had been enough of an introduction.

I was Alice Tan's daughter.

Kaelob's little sister.

Part of a family that seemed to stretch in every direction.

There was always an aunt, an uncle, a cousin, someone who knew someone, someone who needed something.

Privacy was mostly theoretical.

If I did something stupid in the morning, there was a reasonable chance someone I'd never spoken to would know about it by dinner.

Damian found that funny.

He hadn't grown up inside it.

Family wasn't something you visited in my world.

Family was everywhere.

And at the center of mine was Mum.

Alice could solve almost anything.

At least, that was what I'd believed as a child.

She worked with numbers the way other people worked with words. The furniture business belonged to the family, but Mum understood the money behind it better than anyone.

She knew what came in.

What went out.

What could wait.

What couldn't.

She also somehow knew who needed school fees, whose electricity bill was late and which relative would pretend they weren't struggling until someone quietly helped them.

Sometimes I wondered whether Mum knew how to say no.

“You worry too much,” she told me whenever I asked.

“You do too much.”

“That's different.”

“How?”

“I'm the mother.”

“That isn't an answer.”

“It is when you're a mother.”

I hated that answer.

Kaelob usually told me to leave it alone.

“She likes fixing things,” he said.

“One day there'll be too many things to fix.”

“Then she'll complain and fix those too.”

That was Mum.

And maybe that was us.

We laughed about problems.

Then we solved them.

At least, back then we did.

A week after Damian left, Mum took Kaelob and me to the business.

I'd been there hundreds of times.

The smell of wood had been part of my childhood. So had the noise, the dust, the people greeting Mum as we walked through.

My uncles were there.

Mum's brothers.

They argued about an order while eating lunch as if the two activities naturally belonged together.

One of them looked at me.

“Germany stole your smile?”

I rolled my eyes.

“Germany didn't steal anything.”

Kaelob laughed.

“Germany has a name.”

I kicked him under the table.

My uncle looked interested.

Mum pointed at him.

“Don't.”

“I didn't say anything.”

“Your face did.”

Everyone laughed.

I did too.

That was what my family looked like then.

Loud.

Annoying.

Complicated.

Safe.

I had no reason to look at my uncles and see anything except the men who had known me since I was born.

No reason to watch Mum checking numbers at the end of the table and wonder whether one day those same numbers would be used against her.

No reason to imagine that the business that had fed our family could ever become the thing that tore it apart.

Those things belonged to another Rose.

An older Rose.

A Rose who would eventually learn that family could ask for more than love.

Sometimes it could ask for everything.

But at sixteen, I knew none of that.

At sixteen, my greatest problem was a boy on an airplane.

That evening, Damian called.

I answered before the first ring had finished.

His face appeared on my screen.

He looked exhausted.

“You look terrible,” I said.

He smiled.

“There she is.”

“What?”

“I missed you insulting me.”

“You've been gone less than a day.”

“I know.”

For a moment, neither of us spoke.

It was strange.

For an entire month, I'd been able to reach out and touch him.

Now he was inside a rectangle in my hand again.

“You okay?” he asked.

I nodded.

“You?”

“Yeah.”

Neither of us was convincing.

He smiled faintly.

“We try?”

I looked at him.

There were a thousand things I could have said.

That I was scared.

That I already hated the distance.

That I didn't know whether two sixteen-year-olds had any chance of making something like this work.

Instead, I smiled.

“We try.”

Back then, I thought trying would be enough.

I thought love failed only when people stopped choosing it.

I hadn't learned yet that sometimes you could love someone with everything you had and still find yourself standing in front of a choice where every possible answer meant losing someone.

And when that day eventually came, Damian wouldn't be there to see it.

Just like I had watched him disappear at the airport, one day he would watch me disappear from his life.

The difference was that he would never know why.