Mrs. Deng paused at the door. “Shanghai’s too noisy. Too bright. You can’t see the stars at night.” She smiled at Sparrow. There was wistfulness in Sparrow’s returning smile, and something stirred in Shao’s memory. A dream of two shimmering figures.

THE RIVERFRONT WAS utterly changed. The freighter passed Shanghai’s industrial districts, once a hive of industriousness. Factories and mills, schools, shops, and temples. Tenements that were home to workers and their families. Now there were only ruins and an eerie silence. Closer to the city’s wharves, within the safety of the International Settlement, the shores were lined with hundreds of shacks, a sea of straw-mat roofs.

A car waited for them at the wharf on the Bund. Shao recognized it at once, an American Ford motorcar his father had imported for his mother’s use. Which she no longer used. The driver opened the door and a familiar figure stepped out. Shao felt a surge of warmth at seeing his father, but in the crush of the Bund and with so many curious eyes, all he did was greet his father with a formal bow. Then he climbed into the back seat of the car beside his father. Sparrow moved to sit at the front with the driver, but Liu Sanmu stopped her.

“Come sit in the back with us, Sparrow,” he said. “I want to hear everything, your story as well as his.”

But it was Shao’s father who did most of the talking on the way home.

His mother had been losing weight for months. Their doctor believed her complaints were purely due to a nervous disposition and worries over her sons. Even though she obediently drank nourishing broths and soothing herbal teas, she grew thinner and weaker. She complained of being in constant pain.

“For your mother’s sake, it’s good that you’re home,” his father said. “Once she worries less, she’ll get better.”

The car turned down a treelined street. The gates to the Liu estate opened and the car entered the gardens Shao had known all his life. After months of winter in central China, he’d forgotten that coastal Shanghai’s climate was so much warmer, more temperate. He had traveled into spring. Trees and shrubs bursting with new growth lined the long arc of the circular driveway that swept past all eight mansions. The fresh greens of emerging leaves, the creamy white of flower buds tinged with colors yet to be revealed.

The car’s tires crunched along the pea gravel drive to the accompaniment of shouts from their head gardener. “Third Young Master is home! Third Young Master is home!”

Stepping inside his house, a cluster of servants welcomed him, including Amah Fu, who pinched his cheeks as though he was still five years old. She left only after he promised to visit her next door, where she was now amah to his cousin’s new baby.