“The Tsai son,” he said without any introduction. “I thought you two were close.”

“He came to study a few times.” I tried not to think about his warm breath at my neck or his fingers tracing my skin.

“Hm.” My father folded the newspaper. “I’ve heard he is going to America.”

“Oh?” I could not say anything else.

“To MIT.” He enunciated each of the three letters. “The only one from Taiwan accepted this year.”

“He must have studied well, then.”

He slammed his newspaper down on the table.

“Your mother said he was interested in you.”

“He might have been.”

“You could have been packing for America by now. Did you scare him away with all your talking?”

“I can’t say we talked much,” I said, a joke with myself, since in those last few days, there really had not been much, our mouths otherwise occupied.

“There it is again. That quick tongue of yours was charming when you were young, but how will we be able to marry you off talking like that? The Tsai son might have been remarkable for his academics, but also in that he took an interest in you. Now what will we do with you?”

“I can keep working at the pencil company with Mother.”

“Your mother will have you, but don’t think she is pleased about it. She and her sister coddled you and your cousin far too much while I was away. Neither of you will be able to carry on their family line.”

“You’ve heard from Meng?” I said, my tone sharp.

His eyes darkened. He returned to his newspaper.

“Last night. She has ruined everything your mother built. Go ask her.”

I was grabbing my shoes, ready to run next door, when I saw Mother at the dining table.

“You haven’t left yet?”

She was normally at the pencil company long before it opened. Instead, she sat kneeling at the table, writing, her pencil scratching against paper.

“A letter from your aunt came last night.”

“What did she say? Was there anything from Meng?”

“There was.” She was frowning in concentration as she wrote. The frown remained even when she stopped to look at me. To my horror, there were tears in her eyes.

“Are they—”

“They’re fine,” she assured me quickly, then wiped her eyes with a sleeve. “It’s just . . . you can read for yourself.”

She pointed to a piece of paper with neat handwriting on the table. Underneath it sat another stack of papers, the characters bleeding in a way I knew meant they had been Reforged. And next to both, a short pencil.