Page 76 of Worth Fighting For

He drops his eyes, turning his face ever so slightly from me.

My throat closes up. I let him go. I can’t talk to him without bursting into tears right now, and I can’t have that on top of everything. I simply stand there and watch all of them leave. Mushu hurries toward me, wraps an arm around my shoulders, and squeezes.

“Thanks, Mushu,” I whisper. I sniffle, then gather whatever pieces of myself I can muster up and leave the conference room. I pretend not to notice everyone peering over their cubicles as I make my way to Baba’s office.

I knock before coming in. “Ba.”

He is gazing out of the floor-to-ceiling windows. “They left, then?”

“Yes.”

“You pretended to be me?”

I now feel like a little kid who’s broken my dad’s priceless vase. “Yes.” My voice comes out in a whisper.

“Why?”

“I—From your emails with Shang, it was clear they wouldn’t agree to deal with anyone other than Zhou.”

Baba finally turns around to look at me. “That’s the surface reason. What’s the real reason?”

“I don’t know, Ba. You’d just had a heart attack. I thought we were going to lose you.” My voice breaks then. “I didn’t want to lose you, and I didn’t want to lose the deal, because it felt like losing you.”

“Mulan,” Baba says, and though his voice is sad, there is a world of love in his eyes.

“I’m sorry, Ba. I ruined everything.”

Like many Chinese parents, Baba isn’t the type to hug, but he does so now, albeit a little awkwardly. Then he releases me and says, “Let me tell you about the time I left the gate open and lost all Grandma and Grandpa’s sheep.”

I laugh-sob. “You did not do that.”

“Oh, I did. Thirteen sheep, they had, and all of them gone, just like that. It was their livelihood. We nearly starved but for the help of our neighbors and family.”

“Ba,” I say again through my tears.

“We all make mistakes, Mulan.”

A mistake. It seems ridiculous to think of this awful mess as a mistake. More like a failure on a massive scale. I’m grateful that Baba doesn’t hate me the way everyone does right now, but I’m still left with a giant wreckage that I’ve created, and no idea how to fix it.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

I’ve never once hated living alone. I love the solitude my apartment gives me, the way it’s the one quiet place I can return to after a long, hectic workday. But this evening, when I walk through the door, the silence hits me hard. My apartment feels so empty, devoid of a soul. I stand in the hallway and see the ghost of Shang on the couch, reading a book. When I look straight at the couch, he disappears. I can still smell him, though.

“Stupid,” I say out loud, just to have some kind of noise in the dead silence. I shake off my shoes and walk off, then come back to put them away neatly. Even now, I can’t deny that the peace that comes with having a tidy, uncluttered place is gratifying.

I put away my coat, then go to the bathroom to wash my hands. Even the bathroom is spotless. Shang and I did a visit to Target, where I found a pretty glass tray for the bathroom, along with a matching soap dispenser and toothbrush holder, and just that one minor change spruced up the entire sink area. Everywhere I look, my apartment is painted with memories of Shang. How? We’ve only gone out for a few days.

The sadness inside grows into a boulder, crushing me. I look into the mirror as I wash my hands. I look so tired and haggard, not at all like a twenty something. Sorrow and worry line my face. I splash my face with some cold water, then walk out of the bathroom and into the kitchen.

It’s worse in here. The kitchen is where Shang and I spent most of our time together. Aside from the bedroom, that is. And in here, we worked as a team, me washing the ingredients while Shang chopped them up. Shang cooking the meat and vegetables while I got the rice cooker going. A quick kiss on the back of his neck as I reached past him, a squeeze of my arm as he slid past, an affectionate hand brushing through my hair. A hundred different ways of touching each other. We couldn’t keep our hands to ourselves, not even while cooking, and it wasn’t even sexual most of the time; it was just us wanting to reach out and touch each other, as though we were extensions of the same spirit.

Tears burn my eyes. I take my phone out of my pocket. I texted Shang earlier in the day, but all he said was:

I need some time.

It’s not unreasonable, nor cruel. He hasn’t even said a single angry or hurtful thing to me, and I know I deserve them. I deserve to be called a liar, a dishonorable thing, a coward, and he hasn’t said anything of the sort. Even now, after the way I have betrayed him, Shang remains kind. He needs time. I can give him that, at least.

Brushing away my tears, I stuff the phone back into my pocket and shake my head, as though trying to shake off the memories of Shang. I blow out my breath.

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