The heat of his breath whispered against her forehead. She felt a prickle in her eyes that might well have been tears.
His hands came to cup her cheeks, brushing down her face. “Six hundred and two,” he whispered. “I am thinking of you.”
“Six hundred and seven,” she shot back. “You are in my heart, even if you are not here.”
“Eight hundred.” He exhaled. “I ache for you.”
“I will need to write these down,” she said. “I’ll forget them otherwise.”
“Oh, I’ll just add them to our commercial cipher books for distribution,” he said airily, and when she gaped at the thought of new versions of this particular code being given out to everyone—with this added—he let out a long, low laugh. She could feel the rumble in his chest above her.
She buried her face in her hands. “I actually believed you were going to do that.”
“I know.” He laughed again. “That’s why it was such a good joke. You’re adorable.”
Their mouths met again. God, she was going to miss him. She tried to memorize everything about this kiss—the feel of his fingers on her hips, the strength in his body as he pushed her against the mats once again, the feel of his chest against hers.
Then he pulled away. The morning air was cold, so cold in the empty space left behind.
“I need to finish packing my things,” he said. “You need to write down the code. And I think you should go before we throw all sense to the wind.”
She almost reached for him. What was the point of having sense? But she remembered. She wanted to stay here. She’d wanted to know her Ah Ma all her life. She wanted this. She did.
Over the weeks that followed, Amelia learned much about her Ma. She heard the story her mother recalled of their parting—similar to her own memories, and yet so different from what she had been told. She told her mother what she remembered (little) and found comfort in the truth.
“Of course you remember it as if you were high up,” her mother had said puzzled. “I was carrying you on my shoulders.”
She was introduced to a younger sister and two brothers. They met each other, talking excitedly, embracing. Her father was quieter, but he listened to Amelia speak about the telegraph, making interested noises and asking questions that demonstrated real effort in understanding. She met an endless stream of cousins, ranging from five years older than her to ones who were still toddling about.
It took her an eternity to learn their names, and so she made them all badges of paper to pin on their clothing.
It was an embarrassment of riches—so much family she didn’t know what to do with them all. Her heart had never felt so big. She had never cried so much from happiness.
“What does Amelia mean?” one of her littlest cousins asked. “Why did they give you that name?”
“I think my…” She still didn’t know what to call the woman who had raised her. Mother was the word that reflexively came to the tip of her tongue. But Amelia didn’t know what that meant anymore. There were mothers enough in the world who had made mistakes with their children. It was just that this mistake was less of an accident, and more of an intentional choice.
It was so much. So much. What were you supposed to do with someone who raised you, lavished affection on you, and who had also taken you from your rightful family? What were you supposed to do when you were angry, upset, outraged, and yet still wildly conflicted?
Amelia sighed. There would be time enough to ponder that difficult question, and talking to a four-year-old cousin wasn’t that time.
“I believe Mrs. Acheson chose the name because she thought it sounded pretty,” Amelia said instead.
“But what does it mean?”
“Hmm.” Amelia frowned. She had asked long ago, and Mrs. Acheson had given her an odd look followed by a bright laugh. Eventually, Amelia had looked it up herself. “I think it means…industriousness? It’s rather amusing. I’m the least industrious person I know. I always have my head in the clouds, thinking of things and managing to mess up basic items like…” Amelia smiled. “Buttons. Or walking in a straight line.”
Ah Ma gave Amelia’s shoulder a playful shove. “You? Not industrious? What does that mean? Did you not invent a way to send Chinese characters across great distances with wire?”
“No, I didn’t!” Amelia protested. “Samuel Morse invented the telegraph. I just came up with a way to use it for Chinese characters. It wasn’t hard. It just took a long time and was very hard.”
She trailed off, looking at the group around her.
“I thought,” she said quietly, “that there would have to be more people like me. People who had been separated from families by war.” She thought of Auntie Zhu. “Or for other reasons. I thought if I worked hard enough, maybe one day they would be able to find each other. I never expected that I would find my people.”
Her mother set a hand on Amelia’s arm. “You’re going back to work on this wire code, aren’t you?”
Amelia hadn’t spoken to her about it yet, but she nodded.
“I don’t think,” she said in a low voice, “that I belong here. I don’t think I belong with Mrs. Acheson either. I’ve never really belonged anywhere.” She shook her head, brushing away that melancholy, and tried for a joke. “I suppose I shall remain something of a nomad then!”
“Nonsense.” Her mother laid a hand over hers. “Belonging in two places makes you a bridge. Not many people can do that. Look at what you’ve done to bring people together.”
Since returning from their trip to Liyang, Grayson had told himself a hundred times not to think of Amelia. Yet he couldn’t help doing so. Was she well?
(Of course she was; he had received a letter yesterday informing him that she’d returned to Shanghai.)
Was she happy? (She’d sounded like it.)
Had she forgotten him? (Unlikely, given the aforementioned letter.)
But he was good at putting off his feelings, so he worked through his lingering sentimentality instead. He wrote a letter to the cable company in San Francisco to start work on an eight-hundred-mile cable to lay to Shanghai. He discussed the precise specifications of that cable with his engineer, and then again with his navigator. He went over depth charts in the Sea of China to plot the best route. He drowned himself in preparations.
And every so often, he sent Amelia a letter. With no telegraph to Shanghai, the distance between them seemed impossibly far. With the possibility of his letters being read by others, he restricted himself to numbers.
Sometimes he sent 507: I want you most desperately. Sometimes it was 372: a desperate kiss. Sometimes it was 412, and he thought of her thighs around his head and the taste of her. But most often, it was 602: I’m thinking of you.
He sent those off when he drafted a plan for instructing Chinese engineers on building lines to Beijing, to Fuzhou. A schedule emerged.
He was good at using work as a substitute for emotion, and yet this emotion lingered. 607: You’re in my heart.
He’d see her again in eight months. Maybe they’d exchange heated, hurried kisses. Or maybe she would have given up in disgust at his absence and moved on to someone else, someone who would appreciate her and be present.