1
Wedgeford Down, Kent
England, 1891
Chloe Fong retrieved her board clip from beneath her arm on a fateful spring dawn, not realizing that calamity was about to befall her carefully ordered list.
The morning air was still cold enough to sink into her lungs. The low golden glow of the sun, tipping over the horizon, threatened to burn the fog away. But in this luminous hour when day broke, with the earth poised between grey and color, the mists still danced like happy ghosts across the meadow.
It was early enough that her list of tasks was new; she put on her spectacles and examined it. Her board clip was her most prized possession: a thin metal, light enough to be carried everywhere and yet stiff enough to be used as a makeshift writing desk. It had been a gift from her father, handed over gruffly after he returned from business one day. A newfangled clip, a metal holder that snapped into place by means of a spring mechanism, trapped sheets of paper against the writing surface, with room for a pencil as well. It was the perfect invention if one made a daily list and consulted it regularly.
Chloe, of course, did.
Her tongue pressed between her lips as she examined the list, item by item, looking for—there. Fetch the sauces for tasting. The basket with the sauce bottles dangled precariously from two fingers beneath her board. Done. One completed…thirty-four remaining.
Was there anything in life more pleasurable than the sensation of striking a dark line through an item on one’s list with a pencil? Yes. There was the visceral sensation of taking out one’s pencil and striking a dark line through the last item on one’s daily list. Finishing a list had an almost talismanic quality, as if the act of turning intentions into words, then words into deeds, carried a subtle magic.
Completing today’s list, however… She’d need more than magic to get through it all. Chloe had the tasting with Naomi, the visit to the butcher and then Mr. Tanner to oversee the use of his ovens for her pork shoulder. There was the naming of Unnamed Sauce (and how many times that had appeared on her list, Chloe could not guess), the making of labels, the pasting of labels…
It was a good thing Chloe was busy this time of year. She needed a distraction.
In a few days, the village would be overrun with visitors to Wedgeford’s annual festival. And when it came to visitors…
Every year for nine years, he had come. Every year for the two years after that, he had not.
That first year he had not come to the Trials, she had waited eagerly—anxiously even. She’d put him on her list, and the item had remained stubbornly undone, unable to be completed in his absence. Rationality had set in after that first disappointment. Think about him only once today had been on her list for months before she accomplished it even once, and she found herself consistently, illogically, backsliding.
At this point, he’d skipped two years of Trials; this would make year three. He wasn’t coming back.
It was time to remove him from her life the way he had removed himself: completely. He had no right to her list. His absence had no right to her list. And if maybe now, with the Trials on top of them, a hint of nostalgia reared its head? She would stomp it into the ground. She was far too busy to waste time on moldering melancholy.
Chloe squared her shoulders and put her pencil behind the clip. The sun was now halfway over the horizon, oranges and pinks and golds tinting the sky with a riot of color. The valley was ringed by blue rolling hills; little golden buttercups had popped up all around the meadow.
Sometimes people thought she was cold, with her spectacles and her lists and her plans and her board clip and her hair always in a strict bun. Miss Fong, she had been told too many times, you’re intimidating.
Everyone thought she was cold until they needed her to be efficient. Today Chloe needed to be colder and more efficient than she had ever been. She shut her eyes, inhaled cool air, and—
“Chloe,” someone said, interrupting her preparations.
She jumped, startled, and whirled about.
It turned out that jumping and whirling when one was barely holding on to a basket full of little glass-stoppered bottles, was a bad idea. She accidentally let go of both the basket and her board clip; three of the little sauce bottles fell. One broke, splattering glass and reddish-brown liquid on her list.
Her list. It felt ominous.
Chloe looked up in agony, and then—when she saw who had spoken—shut her eyes in redoubled agony. She had seen him for scarcely half a second, but she hadn’t needed even that to identify the shape of him leaning against the wall of the barn. He looked the way laughter sounded; he was tapping his lips with one finger and smiling down at her with unholy glee. He had always looked like he was laughing at her.
He was here. Why in God’s name was he here?
“You.” She reached almost without thought to touch the bracelet on her wrist. “You.” She took in a deep breath.
She’d been small in comparison with him ever since he’d shot up in height when he was fourteen. But being small had never stopped people from calling her intimidating, so she straightened as high as she could manage and glared at him.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded.
He just smiled more broadly. “Miss Fong. What shocking informality after our three years apart. I appreciate it.”
He was tall and dark and handsome. The perfect storybook hero, if storybook heroes had ever been half-Chinese. She could see the similarities she shared with him in the planes of his face, the width of his nose, the fold of his eyelids. And he was giving her that infernal smile that had haunted her lists for far too long.
He wasn’t like the heroes in any of the English storybooks Chloe had read as a child, but he hadn’t matched the stories her Ba told her either. There had been a time, back when he’d focused on her so intently, seeking her out year after year, when she’d thought he was a story written just for her.
Stupidity, that. He’d been written only for himself. He had nothing to do with her.
She glared at him. “Answer the question or go away.” As always, she regretted the words the instant they came out of her mouth. Why had she given him a choice when she only wanted him to leave? She changed tactics. She was going to have to be horribly inhospitable. “What are you doing here?”
There was a lazy humor to the slouch of him. She gritted her teeth as he turned to her.
“We haven’t seen each other in three years, but I agree with your assessment—it feels as if no time has passed at all. Of course I grant you permission to call me by just my surname. ‘Mr. Yu’ sounds all too stuffy between childhood friends, does it not? But ‘Jeremy’ would do just as well, if not better. You used to call me that.”
“You.” Chloe took a deep breath. “I was addressing you by a common, indeed, a generic pronoun. Not your surname.”
Yu wasn’t even his real surname; she knew that. It was just the one he’d given. Nothing about him was real. Not that easy familiarity nor his laughing eyes. He was a specter, the sort that cropped up every year until finally it didn’t. He was the kind of man who made her want to light firecrackers.
Alas. Whatever demons might be expelled by the cracking sound of gunpowder, Jeremy Yu was not one of them.
“Well then,” Jeremy said, “let’s try a more specific name, then. Jeremy.” He leaned toward her again, his eyes sparkling. “You can say that, yes? It’s my name. You’ve used it before.”