Twice Loved
Copyright© 2026 by Komiko Yakamura
Chapter 1: Monopoly Night
I have a theory about the people who stay.
Not the ones who show up when everything is fine — parties, dinners, the easy Saturdays when nobody needs anything from anybody. Those people are everywhere. I have never been short of those people. What I mean is the ones who stay when staying costs them something. When the room gets hard and the air goes wrong and most people find a reason to be somewhere else. Those people are rare. In eighteen years of living I had met exactly one of them, and I had been watching him for thirty-two days when the night I am talking about happened.
His name was Brent Saunders. He had been dating me for one month.
I want to be precise about that. Thirty-two days. I know because I counted, the way you count things you are not supposed to be counting.
It was a Friday in December and we were playing Monopoly at the kitchen table, the three of us, because Brent had suggested it and Yasmin had laughed and said only someone raised without sisters could think Monopoly was a good idea, and he had said he wasn’t afraid, and so here we were.
Parisa had Boardwalk. She always got Boardwalk. It was one of those facts about her that operated like a law of nature — Parisa would read the thickest book in any room, Parisa would remember the name of every minor character three hundred pages later, and Parisa would get Boardwalk. She was sitting across from me with her hair loose around her shoulders and her reading glasses pushed up on her head because she wore them even when she wasn’t reading, the way some people carry a book they may or may not open. She was counting her paper money with the focused pleasure of someone who had already decided she was going to win.
Brent was watching her count.
I noticed that. I noticed most things about Brent by then. It was not something I chose; it was something that happened, the way your eyes go to movement in a room before your brain catches up. He was watching my sister with an expression I did not have a name for yet. Something patient and attentive, the way you watch a person who interests you, not the way you watch a person you expect something from.
Then Parisa looked up and said, “You’re down four hundred dollars and you just landed on my railroad. Do you want to concede now or suffer through it?”
“I don’t concede,” Brent said.
“You will.”
“Probably. But not yet.”
She smiled at that. Parisa did not smile easily at people she did not know well, which meant she had decided she knew Brent, which was its own kind of information. She pushed the glasses back down her nose and reached for the dice.
She never threw them.
I have tried to remember the exact sequence of what happened next and I find I cannot make it clean the way memory sometimes lets you make things clean. What I have are images. Parisa’s face going wrong all at once, the glasses falling, her hand shooting out and catching the corner of the Monopoly board as she went forward, the cardboard edge catching her above the left eye before the floor came up to meet her. The sound she made, which was not a word. The way her body locked.
I know I was standing. I do not remember standing up.
My father came out of the living room and stopped in the kitchen doorway. My mother made a sound behind him. Neither of them moved. I understand that now, the way you understand things later — they had been afraid of this moment since the meningitis, waiting for it, and when it arrived the fear had its hands around both of them and they could not move through it.
Brent was already on the floor.
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