The evening light had turned the fields copper.

  Wei's mother came.

  I'd seen her perhaps a dozen times in all the months I'd lived on the hill. A woman who existed at the edges of scenes — present at meals, visible in the yard, a shape in the doorway when Wei left in the morning and a shape in the doorway when he returned. She didn't speak much. Habit, not reluctance. She'd never been in a room where her words changed anything.

  She was thin. Thinner than Wei, which was notable given that Wei had spent six months underfed. Her hands were raw and calloused, the hands of a woman who worked the earth every day and the earth worked her back. Her face was unremarkable — a farmer's face in a province of farmers, distinguished from the others only by the configuration of lines that decades of sun and wind and worry had carved into her skin.

  She stood in front of me.

  Not at the hut. I was outside — sitting on the stone where I sat evenings, the flat rock at the edge of the village where the ground rose slightly and you could see the fields and the forest and the path that led north into the mountains. She'd walked up to me. Deliberately, each step an act of will, the gait of a woman who had rehearsed this approach in her head and was now executing it before the courage expired.

  She stopped two meters away. Looked at me. Her face was — working. The muscles pulling in different directions, fear and determination fighting for control of her expression, neither winning decisively.

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  "Please go."

  Two words. The politeness of a woman who understood that she couldn't demand anything from the woman in front of her and had chosen to ask because asking was the only tool she had.

  She wasn't angry. There was no confrontation, no accusation. She was afraid. Simply, thoroughly afraid — the fear had moved past emotion and into structure, become load-bearing, become the thing her posture was built on.

  "My son," she said. Then stopped. Started again. "He was a normal boy."

  Was. Past tense. She'd moved him there already.

  "He caught fish. He collected herbs. He argued with me about eating his rice. He was—" Another stop. Her jaw worked. "Normal."

  I waited.

  "Then you came."

  It wasn't an accusation. It was a chronology. Before you, things were a certain way. After you, they are a different way. The sequence was the argument.

  "He has light in his eyes now," Wei's mother said. "People are frightened. I don't sleep. The elder won't come near this hut." She swallowed. "He's my son. I want him to be safe."

  "He is safe."

  "Is he?"

  The question hung between us. Not rhetorical — genuine. A mother asking something she needed answered and probably knew couldn't be.

  I looked at her. The lines, the raw hands, the shoulders carrying a family and a field and a son who had become something outside her understanding.

  "Yes."

  She waited to see if I'd say more. I didn't.

  She nodded. Once. Tight.

  She turned. Walked back down the slope. Her steps were slower going down — the weight heavier, or the courage used up, or the exhaustion of a conversation where everything that mattered was said in the spaces between the words.

  I watched her go. A thin woman, walking back to a family she couldn't protect from something she couldn't understand.

  She was the best of them. Because she'd come. Because "please" was a word that cost more than any of the others and she'd spent it without hesitation.

  I sat on my stone and looked at the village and knew that it was over.

  Tomorrow I would tell Wei. Tonight I would let his mother have one more night of pretending that her son might stay.