The sea had not been water that night. It had been a dark, deep grave without bottom.

Bea Tran remembered the screams swallowed by waves, the frantic hands clawing at air, the moment her mother’s grip slipped from hers. Her father’s face disappeared beneath the black surface, eyes wide, mouth open, then gone. The South China Sea did not care about love or family—it consumed them all the same. Bea did not cry. She stared. She memorized the way drowning looked, the way silence followed when the last gasp was taken. That silence lodged inside her, a parasite that never left. It grew inside her and became her.

The refugee camp was no sanctuary. Camp Galang reeked of sweat, sickness, and despair. Children huddled in corners, their ribs sharp as knives. Nguyen found her there. He promised protection, whispered survival, but his kindness was a mask. He taught her that obedience was the price of food, that her body was currency. Park was worse. His cruelty was blunt, bruising, a reminder that even children could be broken into silence. Bea endured. She learned to fold pain into herself, to paint it later as something beautiful, something others would call art. But beauty was only camouflage. Beneath it, the shadows never lifted.

Forty-five years later, the shadows returned. They had found their way into her refuge. Into her peaceful life, the parasite had crawled out.

The tea was still steaming when Bea found the body. Conrad Fischer lay sprawled across the concrete floor of her studio, his suit twisted, his eyes open and unseeing. The mug slipped from her hands, shattered, tea spreading like seawater across the floor.

The smell rose first. Not just tea—something acrid beneath it, faint but unmistakable, like scorched herbs or bitter roots. Bea inhaled, and for a moment she thought of the plants she had studied, the poisons she knew, the tinctures she had painted into memory. She crouched beside Fischer, her hand hovering near his chest. His skin was cooling, his lips cracked, his face flushed with a purplish hue. She did not touch him, but she lingered there, as if measuring the distance between life and death.

Her breath steadied. She cataloged the scene the way she cataloged memories before painting.

The north wall was bare. Four paintings from her “Between Waters” series—her parents’ death, her escape, her arrival—gone. Stolen. Violated. The body at her feet.

She knew how the police would see it: an immigrant woman, alone, trained in plants and poisons, standing in her studio with a dead man and missing art. The narrative wrote itself.

And she rehearsed it, silently, as she stood there: I was making tea. I came back. He was already on the floor. I don’t know what happened. The words formed easily, practiced, as if she had spoken them before.

Her fingers brushed the floor near Fischer’s outstretched hand. The tea had pooled there, dark and sticky, mingling with the faint scent of something medicinal. She wondered if anyone else would notice. She wondered if anyone else would understand.

She dialed 911 with steady hands.

“My name is Bea Tran. There’s a dead man in my studio.”

Her voice did not tremble.

Outside, sirens wailed. Inside, the tea cooled, the body stiffened, the walls gaped with absence. Bea stood in the center of it all, survivor and witness, artist and child of the sea.

And as the red and blue lights strobed through the warehouse windows, one thought flickered in her mind, sharp and undeniable: He deserved it.

Had Bea merely survived again—or had she finally learned to strike back?