Ride, high priest of steady nerves, intoned his way through the ceremony. “Do you, Cheung Tak-Wing, take this woman to be your lawful wedded wife?”

Tak-Wing, in top hat and tails, looked like a nineteenth-century English hero standing on the precipice of a windy cliff. His face was a little pale, but he held his head high and said, “I do.”

“And do you, Emily Mah Wai-Yee, take this man to be your husband, to have and to hold, ’til death do you part?”

“I do,” said Emily, the beautiful ghost.

She had no idea how death might come to her or to Cheung’s handsome if self-centred son.

As for Ting-Yan, she regrets her curse now, just as she regrets the villain hitting ceremony she paid for and enacted with Granny Kwok against Granny’s advice by the Goose Neck Bridge. She once said that she’d felt compelled to do it by something deeper than herself, something ancient and primal that could not be stopped. “Don’t talk nonsense,” I told her. “Jealousy is the most natural emotion in the world. Besides, we are modern women. We know that curses can’t come true.” Ting-Yan is my nearest and dearest. She is not a bad person. She is one of the best people I know. But she was young and she was hurt and she was angry. Why do we relegate the ones we don’t love to realms more distant that those we still hold open for strangers? And even further still if they love us in spite of our neglect. Tak-Wing’s disdain for Ting-Yan was more than half the problem, but he would never acknowledge it, not even on his deathbed, not even after all that happened later.