Luther could still remember every detail of the day his grandfather passed away.

  It was a sweltering July noon. The eleven-year-old boy was on summer break, tagging along with David to Columbia and sitting in the lecture hall among the college students while the old professor stood at the podium giving his lecture.

  “Professor David!”

  “Oh my god! Help!”

  “Call an ambulance!”

  Hearing the shouts from people around him, Luther lifted his head from the manga he was reading and saw David already collapsed motionless on the floor.

  “Grandpa!!!”

  He jumped up and ran, tripping and hitting his head on the corner of a desk, then quickly scrambling up again and rushing forward. Luther clutched David’s arm, sobbing out loud.

  “Wake up, Grandpa! Please, wake up!”

  But David remained unconscious. The ambulance arrived and took him away, and Luther stayed right by his side without leaving for even a single step. The hospital moved the old man from the emergency room to a Palliative Care Room. The boy’s face had gone pale as he watched the doctors review the test results and shake their heads with heavy sighs.

  In David’s final moments, lost in a haze of delirium, he kept muttering something, perhaps perhaps things he couldn’t let go of, maybe words of farewell, tangled with vague pleas or sighs of regret.

  Luther couldn’t bring himself to speak; his voice was already hoarse from crying. The boy’s face was scrunched tight in grief, helplessness, fear, and hunger. All he could do was squeeze his grandfather’s hand tighter, wishing to pull him back from the grasp of Death.

  But no miracle came. David breathed his last in the early hours of the next morning.

  The funeral of the esteemed Professor David Ravenswood was carried out swiftly with the help of the local authorities and neighbors, for he had no other family left in this world.

  The church bells rang out in long, echoing tones as the priest delivered his eulogy, praising David’s kindness and integrity, and speaking of the sorrow felt by neighbors, friends, and former students for the loss of the respected professor.

  The priest mentioned David’s late wife and his ill-fated daughter, yet the boy sitting in the first row was never brought up, not a single word, as though he had never even existed.

  David’s final resting place was a modest grave in the Saint Joshua Cemetery.

  As for the house and belongings he left behind, the authorities did not seize them the way they usually would when someone died without legal heirs. Luther’s cloak also affected the home he had lived in since birth and erased it from the memories of others.

  In a way, that was a small stroke of luck for the boy; it allowed him to keep the last place in the world he could call his own.

  When his grandfather had just passed away, Luther was already capable of fending for himself to a certain degree. From a young age, David had taught him to handle household chores and look after his own needs. Even so, the fact remained that he was just eleven at the time.

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  The period right after the funeral was, without question, the hardest time of his life.

  The house fell into a complete mess in just three weeks. Leftover food piled up, rotted, and grew mold in the trash. The sink overflowed with dirty dishes until there was no space left.

  Luther didn’t go to school at all during that time, yet not a single teacher or classmate called to check on him. It was as if the entire world had forgotten he existed, or perhaps, as if no one had ever known him in the first place.

  The boy spent most of those days asleep. Each day, he slept for at least seventeen hours. When he could no longer force himself to stay asleep, he would lie motionless in bed, staring at nothing, until the headache, dizziness, and nausea became so unbearable that he dragged himself up to eat something.

  Sometimes it was instant noodles, sometimes a frozen hamburger or pizza, and other times just a glass of milk before sitting down in front of the TV until he dozed off again.

  If an ordinary person had lived like that, they would have gained weight so fast, but Luther was the opposite; he grew thinner each day.

  He didn’t even realize that he had lost over twenty pounds in just three weeks. And even if he had noticed, he wouldn’t have cared. At that point, he no longer knew what reason he had to keep living.

  He drifted through his days like that until the inevitable happened: a heavy illness struck.

  In the haze of a high fever, his mind became a battlefield of strange visions. He muttered in delirium, just as David had in his final hours.

  Luther felt that he was about to die.

  I wish I could just die.

  But his wishes, for as long as he could remember, had rarely been granted.

  In a blurred dream, he felt someone holding him gently in their arms, washing him, feeding him porridge, the dish his grandfather used to make whenever he was sick, and caring for him with great attention.

  Grandpa … The boy sobbed.

  He could feel the heartbreak through those trembling hands.

  Bit by bit, within that warm dream, he was loved again, cared for, looked after, just as he had been when David was still alive.

  Am I dreaming? I hope I can just stay like this and never wake up.

  But he still woke up.

  And then, something like a miracle, one Luther himself had never hoped for, took place: the fever was all gone when he opened his eyes.

  His face was still wet with tears. At that moment, he finally understood what his grandfather had been trying to say in the fevered whispers of that last night.

  “Don’t give up, Luther. No matter what, don’t give up.”

  From that day on, he began a new life.

  He cleaned the house and kept it neat and tidy. Cooking became a habit, replacing fast food with meals he prepared himself.

  The change was not just in his living space or his diet, but also in his studies. David had always hoped Luther would go to Columbia for college. The boy didn’t want his grandfather’s final plea to go to waste. He would have to change himself, even if no one else in the world cared.

  …

  Aaron sat frozen on the living room sofa.

  “And … what about your father?” he asked.

  “Dead,” Luther replied.

  David had told him so, yet Luther had never seen even a single photograph of him anywhere.

  “So you’ve been living alone for three years? Since you were twelve, no, eleven? And Mr. Raven only woke up about a month ago?” Aaron asked.

  Luther gave a small nod. He unzipped his backpack and began pulling out textbooks and notebooks.

  “Then who does the laundry for you? Who cooks? Who cleans the house? Who …” Aaron stopped mid-sentence because he realized how pointless those questions were. “No one’s ever noticed? Relatives? Friends? Neighbors? Local authorities? …”

  His voice had gone rough. He just couldn’t imagine what it would be like to live with absolutely no one who cared.

  “It’s fine. I’m. Used to it.” Luther tried to brush it off.

  “That’s a damn curse,” Aaron muttered, anger flickering in his chest.

  “Let’s study. Today we learn. Angles and. Straight lines.” Luther tried to change the subject.

  “Uh … okay.”

  “In this case, if you draw a perpendicular line from this point to this edge, then from that, you can deduce …” Luther explained without stumbling over a single word. “… and in the end, we can conclude that this is an equilateral triangle. Do you get it?”

  He stopped and looked at the brown-haired boy, who was clearly not paying attention.

  “Luther,” Aaron cleared his throat and spoke, “from now on, you have me. I’ll always be your best friend, no, your best brother. I’ll always be here for you.”

  He scratched the back of his head.

  Shit, that sounded so cheesy. Ahhhh, whatever.