Chapter 12

Tom called the moment he landed, exactly as promised, his voice a little rough with jet lag but unmistakably warm. “I’m home. Later than I meant to call, but I wanted to hear your voice before I let myself fall asleep.”

“You didn’t have to wait up for me,” Emiko said, smiling into the phone from her spot on the balcony, the kids long since gone to bed.

“I wanted to.”

They settled quickly into a rhythm after that — calls most evenings, her morning and his afternoon overlapping just enough to make it work, though the international rates on her end started to add up faster than she’d expected within the first week.

“Download WeChat,” Tom told her, the third time her phone buzzed with a low-balance warning mid-conversation. “Everyone I know who’s married across borders uses it. Free calls, video, all of it, so long as we’re both on Wi-Fi. I should have told you on day one.”

She downloaded it that night, and from then on neither of them thought about the mechanics of it again — it simply became the quiet, constant thread running underneath everything else, a voice note waiting when she woke, a video call most evenings once the kids had scattered to their rooms.

The calls covered everything and nothing — his mornings at the fund, her afternoons in the lab, the small irritations and small joys of two lives running in parallel on opposite sides of the world. She told him, one night in the third week, about the paper she’d finally gotten accepted after two rounds of revisions. He told her, a few nights later, about a market call his brother had gotten badly wrong and the two of them had argued about it for an hour before landing somewhere close to agreement.