“It wasn’t just one thing. This entire time, I treated her badly, I took her for granted. And now, I’ve really hurt her.” Yvonne shook her head. “She didn’t deserve any of it.”

“Oh, Xiăo táo.” Nita reached across the table and put her hand on Yvonne’s. “You really care about her, don’t you?”

“More than I’ve ever cared about anyone.”

“Then you have to fight for her.”

“No,” Yvonne said quietly. “It’s too complicated. This arrangement of ours, this farce of a marriage, I should have never let things get this far. I should have never let the lines get so blurred.”

The room fell silent. Nita folded her arms on the table before her, her eyes wandering off into the distance.

“There’s something I’ve never told you,” she said. “It’s about Mark and me. You see, our marriage was an arrangement of sorts too.”

Yvonne stared at her. “Really?” That explained why Nita had been so quick to accept Yvonne and Ruby’s marriage.

“It’s true. We barely knew each other when we got married, and we certainly weren’t in love. You never thought it was odd that I got married out of the blue? I suppose you were too young to notice.”

Yvonne vaguely remembered Nita getting married when she was around ten years old. Her father had forbidden her from going to the wedding, as it wouldn’t have been ‘appropriate’ due to Nita’s status as the help.

Nita leaned back in her chair. “The story isn’t the least bit exciting. I was in my late twenties and single as could be. It had my parents worried. They were very traditional. They were concerned that I wouldn’t be able to find someone to marry at such an ‘old’ age. Eventually, they decided to take matters into their own hands and find me a husband, all under the guise of matchmaking.”

“And you let them? That doesn’t sound like the Nita I know.”

“Of course I didn’t. I resisted every step of the way. My parents presented me with an endless stream of potential husbands. To my parents’ dismay, I turned them all down in the rudest way possible. That was, until Mark.”

Nita’s eyes grew distant. “He was the son of a family friend. My parents invited him and his parents over for dinner without telling me. I was furious until I saw him. He was one of the most handsome people I’d ever seen. But he soon proved to be arrogant and frustrating.”

Hadn’t Yvonne felt that way too, when she’d first laid eyes on Ruby? That intense physical attraction, followed immediately by irritation?

“After dinner, our parents sent the two of us out for a walk, alone. We ended up wandering the neighborhood for what seemed like hours, venting to each other about how crazy our parents were when it came to marriage. His were even worse than mine. And on that walk, he proposed that we marry each other just to get them off our backs. Against all my better judgment, I agreed. A couple of months later, we were married.