Five years in Japan can make a man feel both older and stranger to himself. I spent mine in loud, freezing industrial sites with a welding hood on my face and metal dust in my throat, chasing overtime the way people chase air when they’re underwater. I told myself I was doing it for one reason: my mother.
My name is Paul Row, and the only real home I’ve ever had was my mom’s voice calling me in for dinner—soft, steady, like nothing in this world could knock us down for good. She raised me and my little brother, Colin, on her own after our dad died in a workplace accident, the kind that gets a paragraph in a company memo and a lifetime in a family’s bones. She worked herself raw at a textile factory, then came home and still found the energy to sit by the fireplace and tell us fairy tales like she wasn’t exhausted down to her soul.
So when I finally saved enough to buy her a house in Los Angeles before I left—one of those modest-looking stucco places that costs a fortune simply because it’s L.A.—I thought I’d bought her safety. I thought I’d bought her peace.
The plane touched down at LAX in late afternoon, that hazy gold light sliding over the palm trees and freeway ramps like the city was trying to look gentle. I grabbed my suitcase, hailed a cab, and told the driver the address like I’d been practicing it in my head for years. My heart wouldn’t settle. It beat like a kid waiting behind a closed door, convinced the best part is about to happen.
I’d been sending money home regularly. I’d called every week. I’d watched my mom smile through a phone screen and told myself that counted as being present. But nothing compares to walking up to her front gate with your own two feet, breathing the same air, knowing you’re about to hold the person who held you first.
The cab stopped in front of the iron gate I remembered. I paid too fast, dragged my suitcase out, and stepped onto the sidewalk.
And I froze.
It was the same house… and it wasn’t.
The simple latch lock my mother always used—the one she loved because it didn’t require “fancy keys” she might lose—was gone. In its place was a sleek electronic keypad, a little LED blinking like a watchful eye. And mounted around the gate and the eaves were cameras. Not one. Not two. At least four, angled to cover the yard, the door, the sidewalk. They moved in slow sweeps, silent and steady, like they were trained to expect trouble.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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