Chapter 275: Chapter 277: Rekindling Old Fire
MEI’S POV
It wasn’t supposed to end up like this.
She’d come to the estate for Aria. That was the reason she always came....to see her daughter, to have lunch, to sit in the garden and drink tea and watch Aria move through this house like she belonged in it, which she did, which still sometimes caught Mei off guard in a way she couldn’t fully explain.
She’d had lunch with Aria and Damien and Alexander, all four of them at the garden table with Mrs Chen bringing things out and the afternoon being exactly the kind of afternoon that would have been impossible to imagine a year ago. Then Damien had gotten a call and gone inside. Then Aria had gotten a message from Morrison about a patient query and gone inside too.
Mei had started gathering her things.
Then Mrs Chen had appeared with a fresh pot of tea and set it on the table.
Alexander was still in his chair.
He looked at the tea.
Then he looked at her.
Neither of them said anything.
Mrs Chen went back inside.
The garden did what gardens did in the late afternoon....went golden and quiet, the light thickening into something slower. Mei poured two cups because the tea was there and it seemed wasteful not to.
She handed Alexander his without looking at him directly.
"Thank you," he said.
"Mm."
"She’s good in there," Alexander said. Nodding toward the house.
"She’s always been good," Mei said. "At everything she decides to do." She looked at her cup. "She gets that from her father."
She felt him go still beside her.
She hadn’t meant to say that. Or maybe she had. She was too tired to be sure of her own intentions around this man.
"Tell me," he said quietly.
She looked at him.
"What she was like," he said. "Growing up. What she was good at. What she...." He stopped. Started again. "I’ve been catching up to twenty four years for three months and every time I learn something new I realize how much more there is that I don’t know." He held her gaze. "Tell me something. Anything."
Mei looked at the garden.
She thought about Aria at seven, taking apart the family radio to see how it worked and putting it back together perfectly except for one wire she’d misplaced and spending three days figuring out which wire before she’d let Mei call anyone to fix it. She thought about Aria at twelve, teaching herself Mandarin from library books because she wanted to be able to talk to the old women in their building in their first language. She thought about Aria at sixteen sitting across a scholarship interview panel and coming home and saying they asked me if I thought I belonged there and I told them the question was wrong.
"She was four," Mei said, "when she decided she was going to be a doctor."
Alexander was very still.
"Not the way children decide things. Not I want to be a princess or a firefighter." Mei turned her cup in her hands. "She’d been at the hospital with me. I was sick, nothing serious, but she’d seen the doctors and she came home and sat at the kitchen table and said Mama, I’m going to learn how to fix people." She paused. "She was completely calm about it. Like she’d just worked something out and was informing me of the conclusion."
Alexander looked at his hands.
"She never changed her mind," Mei said. "Not once. Twenty years from that kitchen table to Mont Senai and she never once said she wanted to do something else." She paused. "Do you know how rare that is. To know what you’re for and just....go toward it. No detours."
"She’s single minded," Alexander said.
"She’s more than that." Mei looked at him. "She’s certain. In a way most people never manage. She walks into a room and she’s already decided who she is and she doesn’t need anyone to confirm it." A pause. "I used to worry about that when she was young. I thought....this child is going to get hurt. The world doesn’t like people who are that certain."
"And?"
"And the world has tried. Several times." Mei’s jaw set slightly. "She’s still certain."
Alexander looked away.
She watched his profile. The particular tension in it....the thing he did when he was feeling something he hadn’t given himself permission to feel yet.
"I would have liked to see that," he said. "The four year old at the kitchen table."
"Yes," Mei said. "You would have."
She meant it simply. Not cruelly. Just....true. He would have loved it. She had no doubt about that, which was its own complicated thing to carry.
He turned back to look at her.
"Are you angry?" he said. "Still."
"I was never angry," she said. "I was afraid. Those aren’t the same thing."
"No," he said. "They’re not." He paused. "Are you still afraid."
She thought about it honestly.
She thought about the man who had made her afraid. The monitoring, the control, the way his love had felt like a room with no windows. She thought about sitting in a corridor at 2am and hearing him say how are you with nothing underneath it except the actual question.
"No," she said.
He looked at her steadily.
"Mei." He said her name the way he’d been saying it for three months....carefully, like he understood he hadn’t earned the right to it and was asking every time. "I know I can’t...." He stopped. "I’m not going to tell you what I want. That’s not...." Another stop.
"Alexander." She set her cup down. "Say what you mean."
He looked at the garden.
"I’d like to spend time with you," he said. "Not arranged time. Not the estate, not hospital corridors. Just...." He paused. "Time. The ordinary kind."
She looked at his face.
He was looking at the garden still, his jaw set in the way of someone who had said the thing and was now waiting with no certainty about what came back.
The old Alexander would never have sat like this. Would never have offered something without already knowing the answer. Would never have left the space open like this....uncertain, waiting, giving her the room to say no.
That was new.
She knew it was new because she’d watched him learn it in the months since he’d arrived in her life again. The checking himself. The pausing before he acted. The moments in hospital corridors and estate gardens where she could see him deciding not to do the thing his instincts told him to do.
It wasn’t perfect. It probably never would be.
But it was real.
