Amelia finished reading through this correspondence and shut her eyes. She had tried to imagine her Ah Ma all her life. She had wisps of memory, barely enough to construct a face, and even that she wasn’t sure about.
But this gave her a little more. She imagined the determination of a woman who kept coming and coming. Who refused to give up. Who kept caring after all hope and reason should have fled. What kind of person must she be?
Oh, she thought. She sounds like…me. Emotion simmered in her heart.
A rap sounded at the door.
“One moment.”
She stood, swiped away her tears, dabbed a handkerchief in cold water and pressed it underneath her eyes. When she thought that the puffiness had been dispelled, she found a smile—it was easy to make her lips pretend—and opened the door.
Grayson stood there. He was watching her, his gaze dark on her. “Well?” he asked. “What have you found?”
Amelia bit her lip. “She is in some place that sounds like Lee Yong, four days up the Yangtze River.”
His eyes met hers. “You see? Forty-three.”
“Forty-three.” She felt her eyes sting. “You were right.”
“I can speak with the consulate’s office back in Shanghai. It will require a bit of paperwork, but we should be able to get interior passes.”
He said this as if it were a small thing to offer to convey her to the woman she barely remembered.
“We?” she echoed. “You don’t need to come with me. I’m perfectly capable of going on my own. You’ve done more than enough…”
He shrugged. “I haven’t done much of anything except help arrange transport.”
“Grayson.” Amelia shut her eyes. “You’ve done a lot more than that. You’re here.”
He exhaled, pressing a hand over his face.
“You’re always so busy. Haven’t you things to do?” She found the thread of a smile on her lips once more and let herself pretend all her other emotions no longer existed. “Are there no employees to bother or other languages to commit to telegraph?”
“Amelia.”
He looked down at her. He seemed close, very close. Probably because he was close. She wasn’t sure when he’d drawn near.
“It’s not just about you.”
She looked up at him.
“My mother.” He shrugged. “I’m her least favorite child—and don’t look at me like that. I can’t fault her for it. If you’d known my brothers, you would have loved me least too.”
“Grayson.” Her heart was breaking for him, and yet he said this all so nonchalantly.
“She can’t help how she feels. She’ll never admit it, but I know she resents that out of the four of us who went to war, I’m the one who survived. And I didn’t make it easy on her surviving, either, with how I’ve been after.”
“Grayson.”
“I can understand it all from her perspective. The resentment. The guilt about the resentment. I don’t want that from her. I can hardly bear to be around my parents because of it.”
“Grayson.”
“But I’m fixing it.” His eyes blazed and he looked at her. “If I can build the transpacific telegraph—well, never mind how it will work. That’s not the point. I’m fixing it, and damn it, if I can do it for you, maybe I can do it for me too.”
“Grayson.” She felt horrified by how quickly he moved on from what he’d just said.
“Just to make things clear between us, when I first met you, before I knew I needed to employ you, I thought about seducing you.”
“Oh.” She felt faintly disappointed. “You stopped?”
He let out a huff of air. “Amelia.”
“What a pity.”
“It has only become worse. I want it more than ever.” He set his hand on her chin, fingers stroking along her jaw. She felt heat ripple through her at his touch. She wasn’t sure if she tilted her head back or if he did.
“Grayson.” She looked up at him.
His hand slid around her to cup her head.
“Gray—”
She could manage no more. He leaned in and kissed her. There was nothing sweet to this kiss, which was just as well because anything sweet in her had burned to bitterness in the past hour. It was searing—his tongue against hers, his mouth open on hers, need pouring out all at once, demanding every fiber of her attention.
He was kissing her. He was kissing her, and she was kissing him back, refusing to be taken by surprise in this. Her own hands came to his shoulders, pulling him close. Then they were kissing deeper, deeper, as if she could inhale the warm solidity of him into her lungs, as if she could take in the happiness he made her feel and drive out all her sorrow.
His arm came around her waist, holding her in place. She could hear the lapping of the waves against the ship, the call of gulls, the buzz of the docks.
He kissed her on and on until time disappeared and the sadness in her chest lightened.
He finally pulled away, his breathing heavy.
She looked up into his eyes. “Thank you.”
“Don’t. That was pure selfishness.” He smiled at her. “I’ve wanted to do that again for months.”
His thumb trailed down her cheek. He smiled sadly. Then he leaned in and kissed her again, this time gently on the lips.
“There,” he said. “I should let you go before we do something neither of us is equipped to handle.”
The days that followed felt like a dream to Grayson. Time passed, but it seemed to run at ninety-degree angles to reality.
The journey back to Shanghai should have been fraught with tension. His own want felt too large to be contained. But the time wasn’t right. He could sense her discomfort in the way she looked out over the gray waters of the ocean with a troubled expression. Yet there was an ease to their time together that defied all explanation.
She’d learned to play Go while in Shanghai, and while he had no experience, she taught him. After a few games that were outright slaughter on her part, he managed to put up a decent fight, getting better and better as the voyage went on.
Then there was the lust. It should have made matters awkward between them, those glances drenched with yearning, the times their hands met not entirely on accident.
It should have been a morass, those moments when she caught him looking off over the horizon to the west, when she took his hand between hers in silent comfort. It all should have been delicate and painful and uncomfortable to be in love with her, to want her, and to know he could do nothing other than offer scant relief, to bid her good night and then imagine her with him when his door was closed.
Instead, it was perplexingly easy to want her. The want fit into his life.
Arriving back in Shanghai didn’t shake the dream either. It just made it feel more like a fantasy. It took a little time to arrange passes to the interior from the consul and to inquire after the places listed in the letters. “Chang Chow” they determined to be Changzhou; that made “Lee Yong” to be “Liyang.” An interpreter fluent in the Wu dialect was added to their retinue.
Going up the Yangtze was its own form of an unreal dream. For all the time that Grayson had spent in Asia, he’d only ever visited the ports in China that were opened to foreigners by treaty. The waters of the Yangtze delta passed through low, rolling hills covered by bamboo forest—endless miles of spiky green leaves that rattled with the wind. The riverbanks had swollen, overflowing in the spring. They passed by paddy after paddy being planted with rice by laborers in wide-brimmed hats.