She had her father’s hands.

That was what people always said — the aunts, the neighbors, the women at her mother’s church who pinched cheeks and smelled like powder and spoke in that particular tone reserved for children who didn’t belong to them. She has her father’s hands. Long fingers, wide palms, the kind of hands that looked like they were built for something specific even if nobody could agree on what. Her mother said it like a compliment. Her father said it like a fact. She had spent most of her sixteen years not thinking about it at all.

She thought about it now because she was looking at her hands in the bathroom mirror, toothbrush in one, foam at the corner of her mouth, seven forty three in the morning light coming through the frosted window above the sink, and her hands looked completely ordinary to her. Just hands. Doing what hands did.

She spat, rinsed, set the toothbrush back in the holder beside the two others. Her brother’s was the blue one. It was crooked in the holder because he always put it back crooked and nobody could get him to stop.

She fixed it. He would put it back crooked again before lunch.

The bathroom was small in the way of all their rooms, a little cluttered with the things four people accumulated in a shared space — her mother’s skincare products lined up in careful order along the top shelf, her father’s shaving kit in the corner of the counter, her brother’s rubber duck from when he was three that had somehow never been thrown away sitting on the edge of the tub looking at nothing. She had told him once that it was weird to still have it. He had told her it was his emotional support duck and she should mind her business.

She’d laughed for longer than she meant to.

She looked at herself in the mirror for a moment the way she did most mornings, not for vanity particularly, just the brief daily check-in of a person becoming familiar with a face that kept changing in small ways. Her hair was half out of the braid she’d slept in. There was a small crease mark on her left cheek from the pillow. Her eyes looked back at her, dark and steady, the same eyes her mother said she’d had since birth, *old eyes*, her grandmother had called them, the kind that looked like they were thinking even when they weren’t.

She pulled her hair out of the braid the rest of the way and didn’t do anything with it yet and went out into the hallway.

---

The apartment was already awake around her.

She could tell without seeing anyone. The specific sounds of her family in the morning were as familiar as her own heartbeat — the low murmur of the television in the living room that her father put on while he read the news on his phone, the particular creak of the kitchen floorboard that only sounded when someone was moving between the counter and the stove, the smell of rice and something fried coming down the hallway in the warm way it did when her mother had been up since six.

Her brother’s door was open. His room was the controlled chaos of a fourteen year old who had strong opinions about where things were even if nobody else could see the system. She glanced in. He was already up, which meant he’d either woken early or hadn’t slept properly, and she made a note to ask him later.

She went to the kitchen.

Her mother was at the stove with her back to the doorway, hair already done for the day, an apron over her work clothes, moving with the efficient ease of someone who had made this same meal enough times that her hands knew the steps without consulting her. The table was half set. Two cups of tea steaming. The window above the sink was open a crack and the morning outside was grey and ordinary and the sound of the street came through it, distant, unremarkable.

"Yuna, come for breakfast!"

She was already in the doorway. "I’m here, Mom."

Her mother turned and looked at her and made the face she made when Yuna appeared before being called, the small complicated expression that was equal parts surprised and pleased and performing mild annoyance at not getting to call again. "Your hair," she said.

"I know."

"Sit down, I’ll do it after."

"You don’t have to—"

"Sit."

She sat.

Her mother put a bowl in front of her and went back to the stove and Yuna looked at the steam rising from the bowl and the ordinary morning texture of it settled around her like something solid. The refrigerator humming. The television murmuring down the hall. The creak of the floorboard as her mother moved.

Her father came in from the hallway with his phone in one hand and his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead the way he wore them when he wasn’t reading but had been recently. He was still in his work shirt from yesterday, which meant he’d been up early or late, she could never tell with him. He looked at the table and at Yuna and said "morning" in the comfortable shorthand of a man who saved his words for things that needed them.

"Morning," she said.

He sat across from her and pulled his tea toward him and went back to his phone and the kitchen held the particular peace of a family that had been together long enough to share silence without filling it.

Her brother appeared in the doorway still in his school uniform with one sock on and his backpack hanging from one shoulder and his hair completely unaddressed.

"You look terrible," she said.

"Thank you," he said and went to the stove to look at what their mother was cooking.

"Sit down," their mother said without turning around.

"I’m just looking."

"You’re in the way."

He sat down. He sat beside Yuna because he always sat beside Yuna, had since he was small enough that it was about proximity and comfort and had continued out of habit long after he would have denied that was the reason. She passed him the second cup of tea without being asked. He took it without acknowledging it.

---

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