Excerpt from All That's Left Unsaid by Tracey Lien, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"I took a week off, but work said I could take more if I need it."

"I'm sure your parents are glad to have you back," said Ms. Buck. Her hair was still as strawberry blond as Ky remembered, but her freckles appeared to have joined forces over the years, forming large islands of light brown on her otherwise milky skin. "I just can't imagine going through this tragedy. It's just ... so devastating. I'm sure it means a lot to them to have you home."

Ms. Faulkner nodded, but her lips remained firmly pressed together, her eyes bloodshot, tears pooling at the edges.

Ky suddenly felt self-conscious about the dryness of her own eyes. She hadn't cried during the funeral. Neither had her parents.

You know what they're thinking, right? said a voice in Ky's head. There was something about being back in Cabramatta that brought Minnie into Ky's every thought, every conversation. She couldn't remember a Cabramatta without Minnie, and her friend's voice always appeared when she least expected it. They reckon you don't care.

That's not true, Ky thought.

Yeah, it is. They think you're a stoic Asian with no feelings and you're drawing on your Confucius values.

What are you even—

You know, the one where Con-fu-cius say, crying is for bay-bee.

Ky desperately wanted to explain to the teachers that just because her family didn't cry didn't mean they didn't care. In fact, there were so many signs that they cared, so many ways to tell that they hurt—the fog that had appeared and refused to leave her mother's eyes since she learned that Denny had died; her father's silence, not because he didn't want to speak, but because he clearly couldn't find the words anymore; the clenched jaw and endless sweating and dead-end fantasies and imagined conversations with friends who weren't even here. The Tran family cared. They'd just been hollowed out.

No one asked.

What?

You know, Ky, you don't have to explain shit to these teachers. They didn't ask, and it's none of their business.

But—

Just stop it.

"So what comes next?" Mr. Dickson said, still mindlessly twisting his fork.

"I don't know if there's anything else after the wake," Ky said, finally returning to the real world, responding to real questions.

"Have you ..." he said, glancing at Ms. Faulkner and Ms. Buck before returning to his noodles, "heard anything else? About what happened?"

Ky noticed Ms. Buck shifting her weight to her other foot; Ms. Faulkner chewed her bottom lip as she looked down at her own plate of noodles. None of the teachers met Ky's eyes.

The facts, which Ky had gotten secondhand from her parents, were patchy, and recalling them made her skin turn cold as she continued to sweat. From her mother, she'd learned that Denny had gone to Lucky 8, a banquet-style seafood restaurant, after attending the traditional December year twelve formal. It was the first and only time Ky's parents had allowed Denny out with friends at night—a reward for doing so well in school—and it came only after months of begging, with assurances from Denny's best friend, Eddie Ho, that they just wanted an excuse to prolong an evening of formal wear. Denny had even roped in Ky to help him make his case.

"Come on, Mum," Ky had told her mother over the phone weeks before the formal. "It's Lucky 8. People get married there. Plus, I got to go to an after-party when I had my formal."

"You did?"

Ky paused, thought about whether she'd actually told her mother about the party she'd attended all those years ago.

"Yes," she said, crossing her fingers. "It'll be fine! He's basically an adult, he's a good kid who's never ever gotten into trouble, and it's Lucky 8!"

"But Cabramatta is not like when you lived here," her mother said in Vietnamese. "It's changed. The people are different from what you remember, it's—"

Excerpted from All That's Left Unsaid by Tracey Lien. Copyright © 2022 by Tracey Lien. Excerpted by permission of William Morrow. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.