“Please,” he interrupted. Not harsh. Just desperate. “Just… please.”
They ate in silence, sitting on the floor beside Marama’s bed. The rain drowned out everything else. For a moment, hunger loosened its grip.
Later, when Marama finally slept, Aminata and Jake stepped outside. The storm had softened into a steady drizzle. Port lights reflected off puddles like scattered stars.
Jake stared at the water, jaw tight.
“I don’t want this forever,” he said suddenly.
Aminata looked at him. “No one does.”
“I mean it.” His voice sharpened, as if he was trying to cut a path through the future. “I won’t live like this. I’ll leave. I’ll work. I’ll become rich.”
She smiled, tired and gentle. “Everyone says that.”
Jake turned to her, eyes burning with something raw and too big for a boy’s body. He was thin, too small for his age, but in that moment his voice carried weight he didn’t fully understand.
“When I’m rich,” he said slowly, as if carving the words into the air, “I’ll marry you.”
Aminata laughed. It slipped out before she could stop it, not because it was funny, but because it was impossible.
“Jake,” she said softly, “you don’t promise things like that.”
“Why not?”
“Because life breaks promises.”
He shook his head. “Not mine.”
She studied his face: the seriousness, the way his hands clenched as if holding on to the future itself. Something in her chest ached, not hope, not belief, but the fragile comfort of being seen.
“You’ll forget,” she said. “You’ll become rich and forget this place.”
“Forget me,” he said. “I won’t.”
Even if you do, she thought, but she didn’t say it aloud.
Instead, she reached into her pocket and pulled out a thin leather string with a small metal washer tied to it.
“My mother gave this to me,” she explained. “It’s nothing.”
Jake took it carefully, like glass.
Then he slipped off a simple woven bracelet from his wrist, frayed from years of wear. “Then keep mine,” he said. “So we don’t forget.”
They exchanged them without ceremony. The rain stopped. Somewhere in the distance, a ship’s horn echoed low and long, like the ocean making a note of their foolish bravery.
Two weeks later, Marama died.
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