But when Mr. Gao opened the door again, he did not hand me a letter. He handed me one of our pencils, a long, barely used one, at that.

“Tell your mother I send her the very best of fortunes,” he said with a bow, then closed the door, leaving me with just a pencil.

I puzzled over the pencil on the tram and why he would send Mother one of the pencils I had just delivered. Did it mean he was rejecting whatever my father had asked of him? Or was there something more to my mother’s message to reply in pencil? I flicked it a few times, weighing it in my hand, to see if maybe Mr. Gao had removed the heart and slipped a letter inside. But it was a true pencil.

“Mr. Gao sends his very best of fortunes,” I told Mother when I returned home.

“Did he give you anything?” she asked, glancing up from where she was overseeing the heart-hardening process.

I handed over his envelope of money. She took it and flipped through, not counting the bills, looking for something.

“Anything else?” she asked.

“I don’t think so,” I lied. “Did you expect something else?”

“A reply to your father’s letter.”

“Mr. Gao didn’t give me a letter.”

“Did he give you a pencil?”

My breath caught. So she did expect a pencil, and there was a secret inside it! I gripped the pencil hidden up my sleeve. Somehow, it would be linked to whatever secret she was keeping from me, the one that you knew, the one that your mother wanted me to know.

“Why would he give me a pencil?” I asked, heart hammering.

Mother frowned.

“Never mind. Go check Meng’s accounting.”

I ran off as quickly as I could with my secret pencil.

The day after I visited Mr. Gao, a policeman came in for a pencil fitting. Our whole family was wary of the police. Many of them cooperated with the local gangs or, after the turn of the war, aided the Japanese in their control of the city. With my father hidden in the back room, it was an especially dangerous time for a policeman to visit.

Luckily, he was only interested in your mother, who did an awe-inspiring job entertaining him. I handed her different pencil hearts, and she slipped them into their temporary casings. He barely looked at what he wrote, commenting on your mother’s beauty in Shanghainese. She either did not understand or pretended not to, continued showing him the pencil hearts until he finally waved at a few and ordered two sets of eight. While dialects could be drastically different, the written language was standardized, and so, after finalizing the purchase, the man took one of the sample pencils and wrote a note to your mother. I craned my head to see it, but she quickly folded the note away, her cheeks flushed. He left with a smirk.