Morning arrived with the subtlety of a full ceremonial procession.
Servants flooded the chambers before the sun had properly cleared the walls. I was washed, oiled, dressed, and presented with a breakfast I didn’t ask for while three different attendants took turns explaining the schedule of a future prince of Corinth.
There was a formal greeting with the king’s advisors.
A brief appearance on a balcony so the people could see that Jason was still safely inside the palace and not, presumably, running back to the Colchian witch.
A fitting for yet another ceremonial outfit that made the short cape look restrained by comparison.
I nearly failed all three.
During the greeting I called one of the advisors by the wrong title and had to pretend it was a heroic joke. On the balcony I smiled so stiffly that a child in the crowd pointed and asked his mother if the new prince was in pain. During the fitting I moved at the wrong moment and tore a seam. The tailor’s expression suggested he was recalculating the future of the entire kingdom.
By the time they finally released me, the palace air felt too thick to breathe.
I told the nearest attendant I needed to walk the city and clear my head before the afternoon duties. No one stopped me. Jason, it seemed, was still allowed that much freedom.
Corinth in daylight was louder than I expected.
Vendors called out prices for olives, fish, and wine. Women argued over the ripeness of fruit. Old men sat in the shade complaining about the young. Children darted between stalls with the same reckless confidence I’d seen a thousand times on the streets of Saigon.
The clothes were different. The language was different. The temples rising above the rooftops belonged to gods who had never heard of motorbikes or banh mi.
But the rhythm underneath was the same.
People were just trying to get through the day.
I was standing at the edge of a small open square, watching a group of children chase each other with sticks, when one of them collided with my legs and bounced off like he’d hit a wall.
He looked up, eyes wide.
The game stopped. Six or seven children stared at the man in the expensive tunic who had appeared in the middle of their square like a lost statue.
The real Jason would have kept walking.
I crouched down instead.
“You all right?”
The boy nodded slowly, still staring.
Another child, braver than the rest, pointed at my cape.
“Are you the hero?”
“Something like that.”
“Can you fight monsters?”
“I’d rather not today.”
They considered this.
Then the smallest girl held out a flat stone and a few broken shards of pottery.
“We’re playing. You can be on our side. We need someone tall.”
I looked at the stone. At their expectant faces. At the distant palace where a wedding was being prepared and a exile was about to be declared.
“All right,” I said. “But you’ll have to teach me the rules.”
What followed was quietly ridiculous.
Their game involved hopping between squares scratched into the dirt, tossing the flat stone, and somehow losing turns if you stepped on a line. I was terrible at it. The children were delighted. Every time I misjudged a hop and nearly crushed a pottery shard, they erupted into laughter and corrected me with the ruthless honesty only children possessed.
When their interest in the local game faded, I showed them something else.
I drew the board for Ô Ăn Quan in the dust with a stick, using small pebbles for the seeds. Explaining the rules in a mix of gestures and simplified Greek took longer than it should have. They argued. They cheated. They accused each other of stealing pebbles. One boy tried to eat a game piece. But by the third round they were fully invested, shouting and shoving and demanding rematches.
Afterwards I taught them the basic rhythm of shuttlecock kicking — using a tied scrap of cloth weighted with a small stone. They were naturals. Within minutes the square was full of children hopping and spinning, trying to keep the makeshift shuttlecock in the air while I stood in the middle calling out counts like a very underqualified coach.
For a little while, the story forgot to breathe down my neck.
No one called me Lord Jason.
No one asked about the wedding or the witch or the future of Corinth.
I was just the tall stranger who didn’t know the local games and kept almost falling over.
When the sun shifted and the children’s mothers began calling them home, the smallest girl tugged on my tunic.
“Will you come play again tomorrow?”
I looked at her open, uncomplicated face.
Tomorrow the city would learn that Medea had been ordered into exile. The day after that, the wedding gifts would be prepared. The day after that…
“I’ll try,” I said.
She seemed satisfied with that.
I watched them scatter into the narrow streets, still arguing about who had won the last round of Ô Ăn Quan, and felt something shift under my ribs — small, dangerous, and entirely against the plan.
I turned back toward the palace before the feeling could grow any louder.
Behind me, Corinth continued its ordinary afternoon, unaware that the man it called hero had just spent an hour teaching its children games from a city that wouldn’t exist for thousands of years.
~~~•••~~~
I didn’t plan to go to Medea’s house.
I told myself I was only checking on Tram — making sure she hadn’t been recognized, making sure the timeline hadn’t shifted while I was teaching children how to cheat at Ô Ăn Quan. The excuse felt thin even inside my own head.
The house sat on the quieter edge of the city, smaller than the palace but still solid, with a low wall and a courtyard that had once probably looked welcoming. Now the gate hung half-open and the air around it felt watched.
I stepped inside.
The first thing I saw was the children.
Two boys, young enough that the world still made sense to them. They were chasing each other across the courtyard with wooden sticks for swords until they spotted me. The game stopped cold. Then both of them lit up with pure, uncomplicated recognition and ran straight at me.
“Father!”
The word hit harder than any accusation could have.
They crashed into my legs the same way the market children had, except these ones knew my face — or thought they did. The older one started talking immediately, tumbling over his own words about a game they had invented and a bird they had seen on the roof. The younger one simply held on to the edge of my tunic and smiled up at me like I had never left.
I couldn’t speak.
Tram appeared in the doorway behind them. Her expression was carefully blank, but her eyes said what are you doing here.
Before either of us could move, another figure stepped into the light.
Medea.
She looked exactly like someone who had been cut open and forced to keep walking. Beautiful in the way storms are beautiful. Exhausted. Burning. When her gaze landed on me, the temperature in the courtyard dropped.
“Inside,” she told the boys, voice low and even. “Now.”
They protested. She didn’t repeat herself. Tram gently steered them back through the doorway, and just like that the only people left in the courtyard were Medea, a handful of silent servants, and the man the story called their father.
Medea folded her arms.
“Have you come to mock me, Jason?”
I opened my mouth.
Nothing useful came out.
“Or perhaps to see whether I am already broken enough for your comfort,” she continued. “The great hero. The future king. Standing in the house he abandoned to make sure the pieces are still lying where he left them.”
“I didn’t come to mock anyone.”
The words sounded weak even to me.
Medea laughed once. It was not a pleasant sound.
“No? Then why are you here? To explain again how this marriage is for the children’s future? To tell me that a Greek princess is a wiser choice than the barbarian who saved your life? I have heard every version of that speech. They do not improve with repetition.”
I had never been on the receiving end of this kind of anger before. Not like this. Not from someone who had every right to it. Every answer I tried to form felt like it belonged to a different man.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
It was the only true thing I had.
Medea stared at me as if I had spoken in another language.
“You are sorry.”
“Yes.”
“How generous.”
Behind her, the other servants shifted.
One of the older women muttered something sharp under her breath about heroes who only remembered their promises when it was convenient. Another spat into the dust.
Tram, standing among them in her borrowed role, had no choice. She lowered her eyes and added a quiet, bitter agreement that sounded just convincing enough to keep her cover intact.
I looked at her for half a second.
She didn’t look back.
Medea took a step closer.
“Keep your sorrow, Jason. Give it to your new wife. She will need it soon enough. The king believes he can discard me like a used tool and dress it up as politics. The princess believes she is gaining a hero. Neither of them understands what it costs to take something that was never theirs.”
Her voice dropped.
“But they will.”
She turned and walked back into the house without waiting for a reply. The servants followed. Tram hesitated only long enough to shoot me a look that was equal parts warning and worry, then disappeared inside after them.
I stood alone in the courtyard until the silence became unbearable.
Then I left.
The walk back through the city felt longer than before. Every laughing child I passed looked like the two boys who had run to me without fear. Every scrap of Medea’s voice followed me like a second shadow.
‘Neither of them understands what it costs.
But they will.’
By the time the palace walls came into view, the original plan had already started to crack.
We were supposed to let the story happen.
We were supposed to keep our heads down and survive the ending.
But I had held those children’s weight against my legs. I had heard them call me father like the word still meant safety. And I had stood in front of a woman who looked at me and saw every version of the betrayal at once.
I stopped at the palace gate and stared at the white stone until the decision finished forming itself.
We couldn’t just let it happen.
Not anymore.
~~~•••~~~
We met on the flat roof of a storage building near the edge of the palace grounds, the one place Tram had mapped earlier that stayed empty after dark. The city below us was a scatter of oil lamps and dying cookfires. Above us, the sky was clearer than any Saigon night I could remember.
Tram sat with her back against the low wall, knees drawn up, the servant’s dress pooled around her. I sat an arm’s length away, close enough to speak quietly, far enough that anyone glancing up from the courtyard would see only two unrelated shapes.
For a while neither of us talked about Corinth.
The stars did it first.
They looked the same.
That was the problem.
“You remember the roof of the old culture house?” I said eventually.
Tram’s mouth tilted.
“You mean the one we weren’t supposed to climb.”
“You still climbed it.”
“You dared me.”
“You didn’t have to listen.”
She was quiet for a moment, eyes on the sky.
“You told the worst jokes that year,” she said. “Every lunch break. Same table near the window. You would wait until everyone else was talking and then drop something so terrible the entire group would go silent.”
“And you still laughed.”
“I laughed because no one else would. Someone had to.”
I smiled in the dark, small and involuntary.
“That’s not why.”
“No,” she admitted. “It’s not.”
The silence that followed was softer than the ones we had been carrying all day.
I picked at a loose thread on the ridiculous tunic.
“Tung sat at the next table for an entire semester,” I said. “I spent months pretending I didn’t care that he could talk to you without sounding like he was drowning. He brought you that stupid limited-edition pen on your birthday. I stayed awake three nights trying to think of something better and showed up with a plastic keychain from the bookstore.”
Tram made a low sound that might have been a laugh.
“I still have the keychain.”
I looked at her.
“You do?”
“It’s in a box under my bed. Next to the poem.”
I groaned into my hands.
“The Valentine’s poem.”
“The Valentine’s poem,” she confirmed.
“My friends swore it would be romantic. They locked me out of the group chat while they wrote it. I didn’t even see the final version until it was already on your desk with my name at the bottom.”
“And then Khoa tried to play music on his phone to ‘set the mood’ and accidentally blasted a recording of his mother yelling about electricity bills.”
I dragged both hands down my face.
“I wanted the ground to open.”
Tram’s voice had gone quieter.
“I still read it sometimes. Not because it was good. Because you looked like you wanted to disappear for a week afterward, and you still didn’t blame them.”
The stars above Corinth kept shining like they had nowhere else to be.
I watched them the way I had watched them that night in Vung Tau — the two of us sitting on the low sea wall after the others had gone back to the hotel, the waves loud enough that we could say things without looking at each other.
“You fell asleep on my shoulder that night,” I said.
“You didn’t move for two hours.”
“My arm went numb.”
“You still didn’t move.”
I exhaled.
“We were so bad at it.”
“At what?”
“Saying anything that mattered.”
Tram turned her head to look at me properly. The moonlight caught the edge of her face the same way it had years ago, when we were still pretending we had time.
“We got one thing right,” she said. “We kept sitting at the same table. Even when it was awkward. Even when Tung brought better gifts.”
I held her gaze.
“And then we stopped.”
The words sat between us, heavier than the myth, heavier than the poisoned dress that was already being prepared somewhere in the city.
“I don’t want to do that again,” I said.
Tram didn’t look away.
“I watched those children run to me today like the word ‘father’ still meant I would keep them safe. I stood in front of a woman who has every right to hate the man I’m wearing and I had nothing to give her except an apology that changed nothing.”
“I keep telling myself we have to let the story finish so we can leave. But every time I close my eyes I see those boys. And I see us. Sitting on opposite sides of something we never crossed until it was too late.”
My voice dropped.
“I am not going to let it happen the way it did. Not this time.”
Tram’s eyes shone, but she didn’t cry. She had never been the kind of person who cried when things got heavy. She just looked at me like she was measuring the distance between the boy who told terrible jokes and the man currently failing to be a Greek hero.
“You’re going to try to change it,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
“Yes.”
“Even if it makes everything worse.”
“Yes.”
“Even if we don’t know how to get out afterward.”
“Yes.”
She held my gaze a moment longer. Then she looked back up at the stars — the same ones we had watched from a sea wall in Vũng Tàu, from a forbidden roof in Saigon, from every version of the night we almost said the things that mattered.
“Okay,” she said quietly.
One word.
It was enough.
We sat there until the oil lamps below began to go out one by one, two people from a different century borrowing a little more time under a sky that had already seen too many tragedies. For the first time since the notebook pulled us under, the story around us felt less certain of its ending.
And so did we.
~~~•••~~~
Morning arrived with the sound of someone deliberately clearing their throat outside my door.
I had slept less than three hours. The conversation on the roof still sat in my chest like a second heartbeat. When I finally opened the door, two attendants were already waiting with the day’s schedule and an expression that suggested Jason was expected to be more enthusiastic about his impending royal future.
I was not.
The first duty was a public walk through the upper market with a small escort so the people could see their future prince looking suitably heroic and not at all like a man who had spent the previous night deciding to break a myth.
I managed the correct nods and the occasional raised hand. I did not manage a convincing smile. One of the escorts asked if I was feeling unwell. I told him heroes sometimes looked like this before important victories. He seemed only partially reassured.
By mid-morning the news had already begun moving through the city.
Medea had been formally ordered into exile.
The decree was posted in the main square: she and the children were to leave Corinth before the next sunset. Anyone found giving her aid after that would answer to the king. The language was polite. The meaning was not.
I found Tram near the servants’ well, drawing water like any other household woman. We did not look at each other directly. She spoke while adjusting the empty jar on her hip.
“She’s not leaving quietly,” Tram murmured. “She’s already spoken to the servants about her plans. She told them they will go to the palace later with gifts for the princess — a sign of goodwill before the journey. The older one asked if Father would come say goodbye. She didn’t answer.”
My hands curled at my sides.
“She’s setting the final pieces.”
“Yes.”
“Then we start today.”
Tram’s eyes flicked to mine for half a second.
“You have a plan?”
“I have the beginning of several bad ones.”
“Of course you do.”
We separated again before anyone could notice the conversation had lasted too long.
My first attempt was almost reasonable.
I requested a private audience with Creon on the grounds that a future son-in-law should discuss the city’s security before the wedding.
The king received me in a smaller chamber lined with maps. I told him, carefully, that exile might create more problems than it solved. That a woman like Medea, pushed into a corner with nothing left to lose, could become dangerous in ways a simple decree would not prevent. That perhaps a quieter arrangement — safe passage, distance, time — would protect Corinth better than a public humiliation.
Creon listened with the polite attention of a man who had already made up his mind.
“You surprise me, Jason,” he said when I finished. “Most men in your position would be eager to see the last of her.” His gaze sharpened. “Unless some part of you still feels responsible.”
“I feel responsible for the city’s safety.”
“As do I. Which is why she leaves today.” He stood, ending the conversation. “Focus on the wedding. The future is cleaner when the past is removed.”
I left the chamber knowing the reasonable approach had failed exactly as expected.
The second attempt was less reasonable.
I found one of the palace scribes and, using every scrap of authority the story had given me, ordered a formal delay of the wedding by two days for “additional purification rites” after the exile. The scribe looked confused but began drafting the notice. For a brief, hopeful window I thought it might work.
Then Creon’s chief attendant appeared, read the draft, and quietly tore it in half.
“The king has already informed the temples,” he said. “The date remains.”
He did not bother hiding his suspicion.
The third was the least reasonable.
I decided to apologize.
Publicly.
I wandered around the city and found Medea in the main square near the exile decree, surrounded by a growing crowd of citizens who had come to watch the Colchian witch receive her final humiliation. Before any last drop of common sense could stop me, I stepped onto the low platform usually reserved for announcements, raised both hands, and attempted the most sincere public apology of my life.
It went catastrophically wrong.
I tried to say that I had been wrong. That the children deserved better. That no kingdom was worth what I had done.
Unfortunately, the combination of Jason’s formal Greek, my Saigon accent leaking through under stress, and the fact that I kept gesturing too much made the entire speech sound like a man mid-possession.
Several people in the crowd stepped back. Someone muttered about foreign magic. A woman screamed that the witch had already taken his mind.
Medea stared at me the entire time with an expression that moved from shock to disbelief to pure, undiluted rage.
When I finished — breathless, slightly sweaty, and deeply aware that I had made everything worse — she stepped forward and spoke in a voice that carried across the entire square.
“Even now you mock me. Even now you turn my suffering into theatre.”
She turned and walked away before I could say another word. The crowd parted for her like water. The whispers that followed me back toward the palace were no longer about a hero. They were about a man who had clearly lost his mind.
Tram found me in a side street afterward, looking like she was reconsidering every decision that had led her to stand beside me.
“That,” she said tightly, “was the worst apology I have ever witnessed.”
“I noticed.”
By late afternoon I had tried three more angles, each more strained than the last.
I attempted to redirect the children’s planned visit by inventing a sudden requirement that all young boys remain outside the palace until after the ceremony.
I tried to have the wedding gifts inspected early by claiming a prophetic dream about poisoned cloth
I even briefly considered “accidentally” starting a small fire in the wing where the ceremonial clothes were stored, before realizing that burning down part of the palace would probably not improve anyone’s survival chances.
Every attempt collapsed under the weight of a story that already knew its shape.
In the narrow shadow behind the olive storehouse, Tram finally said the thing she had been holding back.
“I could tell them.”
I looked at her.
“Creon. The princess. I could warn them about the dress and the crown. If they know what’s coming, they don’t put them on. The children never have to deliver anything.”
The logic was clean. The cost was not.
“If you tell them,” I said, “Medea dies today. Publicly. For a plan she hasn’t even finished yet. For something that only exists because the man wearing this face decided a kingdom was worth more than she was.”
Tram’s jaw tightened.
“And if we don’t tell them?”
“Then we find another way.”
She studied my face for a long second, then exhaled hard through her nose.
“You’re still refusing to hand her over.”
“I’m refusing to let her be executed for my story’s mistake.”
Silence settled between us.
Finally Tram nodded once, sharp and reluctant.
“Then we have one option left that doesn’t end with her dead before sunset.”
I waited.
“We take the children,” she said. “Tonight. After the city sleeps. Before she can put the gifts in their hands. We get them out of Corinth and as far from this story as the notebook will let us go.”
The plan was desperate. Incomplete. Probably doomed.
It was also the first one that didn’t require someone else to die for Jason’s choices.
“Okay,” I said.
Tram’s eyes met mine in the fading light.
“Tonight, then.”
Neither of us said the obvious part out loud:
We were about to steal two children from a myth that had already decided they wouldn’t live to see the next ending.
And the story would notice.
