Lian didn't speak much that weekend.
Not out of sadness. Not confusion. Just a stillness he couldn't explain.
His mother noticed. She made him sweet soy milk in the morning, left it steaming on the kitchen table before heading off to clean houses. She didn't ask questions. That was something Lian had come to appreciate—how she could speak volumes with silence, how her absence of questions sometimes meant she trusted him to find his own.
His father didn't say much either, though that wasn't unusual. He stayed longer in the garage these days, fiddling with things Lian couldn't name—wires, parts, projects that had no real shape. Once or twice, Lian caught him watching from the hallway, eyes narrowing not with suspicion but with something like... distance. A space too wide to cross.
Lian didn't try to close it.
On Sunday afternoon, Lian took the old journal—his own—and walked to the neighborhood park. Not the one with the basketball courts and noise, but the small one tucked between apartment buildings, half-wild with weeds and dry grass.
He sat beneath the crooked tree.
The air smelled like rust and spring.
He flipped through the pages. Bears. Foxes. Spiders. Tigers. Owls. So many names. So many shapes.
Some pages were messy, frantic. Others careful, almost reverent.
All of them were versions of the same question:
What do I need to believe about you to feel safe?
He stared at one drawing in particular—an old one. Jamie, from back when they'd just started talking. He'd drawn her as a cat then, sleek and clever. But now, that felt too simple. Too small.
She was more than that.
He remembered the moment she had stood up for Eli when the others laughed. He remembered the time she stayed behind after class, helping the teacher pick up papers no one else had noticed had fallen.
He took his pencil, hovered it over the old drawing—then stopped.
He didn't need to fix the image.
He just needed to outgrow it.
Back home, Lian tucked the journal beneath his mattress.
Maybe one day he'd open it again. Maybe not.
That night, he lay awake staring at the ceiling, listening to the hum of the refrigerator, the soft knock of tree branches against the window.
He thought of Mr. Arman's quiet smile.
He thought of Jamie's sharp eyes and soft voice.
He thought of Eli's nervous laugh, his relentless kindness.
And then he thought of himself—not as an animal, not as a question—but as something still becoming.
Not finished.
Just unfolding.