Mr. Hwang was looking for Adeline’s reaction, though. It was clear that someone hadn’t told him the whole story—she thought she knew how her mother had gotten that information, and it had nothing to do with living in Blackhill territory. She glanced at Genevieve, who was studiously tearing apart the fish.
“What was the gang like?” Adeline asked instead.
Mr. Hwang looked pleased by her interest. He dropped his voice. “Have you heard how gangsters have magic?”
Adeline thought briefly about letting him talk even more, but decided she’d rather get to the point and nodded, to his disappointment.
“Yes, well. The Blackhill Brothers ran rackets around the quarries; I guess they worked there once. But they were able to sense metal. They took me out of the car into the jungle, into the hills. The lead man would close his eyes every few steps. I thought he wasfalling asleep. But then he stopped, bent down, and dug in the soil to unearth a metal grate. It was a tunnel! The whole hill was full of tunnels and caves. They brought me underground into the basement of a house, and that’s where I was kept. They fed me bread and water.”
“But the gang members,” Adeline said, unable to help herself, “what were they like?”
Mr. Hwang frowned, as though she were herself unearthing a tunnel he’d left buried. “Well… normal thugs, most of them. But their leader was… Have you seen a mole? No? You know what it is? They live underground, so they don’t see very well. They have tiny eyes like pinholes and their noses twitch… He reminded me of them… Fellow moved quicker in the dark.”
“Did he have a lot of tattoos?”
“He was covered in them.” Mr. Hwang looked askance. “You’re very interested in the kongsi, ah.”
“Just learning about how my mother grew up.” Mr. Hwang nodded sympathetically. How could he not? “Their leader, he was executed?”
“Hung like his followers. Zero tolerance, that’s how we progress as a country.” But he looked unsettled for the first time, drawn somewhere into the depths of a lost memory. Perhaps he imagined the man twitching, still, at the end of the rope.
Afterward, while the maids cleared the dishes, Adeline volunteered to help Genevieve cut fruit for dessert. “No one told me that’s how you met my mother.”
“That’s not how we met.” Genevieve chopped the papaya with a thud. “My mother swore by her mother’s qipaos. Only person she would ever buy from. So I grew up visiting that shop a lot, and we became friends. During the war, I knew her family didn’t have enough rations, so I shared some with her as mine had plenty. Then one day we went back and the shop was simply boarded up. Later I learned your grandfather died in the war and her mother had died from illness and heartbreak, and she had run away from home. Igrew up and met my husband, and then didn’t see her again until the kidnapping.”
“It was Red Butterfly’s information, not hers.”
“Yes, of course. I’d kept track of her and knew she’d become influential there. I knew the police weren’t going to find him easily without inside knowledge, and at the time, the Blackhill Brothers were known for being brutal and desperate. So I asked for her help—and she gave it. Red Butterfly’s information led to his recovery, and the Blackhill’s entire leadership was executed. In exchange she asked for my help to start a business.”
“You never told your husband?”
Genevieve smiled wryly. “There are things you don’t tell your husband. You’ll learn that when you’re older.”
“I’m not marrying your sons.”
Genevieve gave a short, incredulous laugh. She braced herself against the counter and tilted her head at Adeline as though trying to see a different angle of her. “Don’t worry. James and Marcus both have girlfriends now. Although who knows how long James’s will last now that he’s away at camp every week. And”—unexpectedly, she wiped her hands off on her dress and cupped Adeline’s face—“I think you would be too much for them, Adeline.”
Adeline blinked. She had heard she was too much before, but it was the first time it had ever sounded like a compliment. She suddenly felt guilty. She’d always thought Genevieve the frilly, airy counterpart to her mother’s work—the tycoon’s wife giving them charity and taking credit for the cameras. Now she thought that assumption had been wrong, too. How many other truths did this week plan to undo?
Genevieve touched her wrists to her eyes and shook her head. “Go bring out that plate, and then you should get ready for bed. We should be there early tomorrow.”
“I don’t have a picture of her.” It had occurred to Adeline earlier, when she was thinking about the funeral. The few framed picturesher mother owned had gone up in flames. It was surprising how grief could find new places to strike, and with it came anger. Someone had not only killed her mother but destroyed everything they had owned together. And she was just expected to go on with her life? The police had ruled it an accident: faulty wiring, a burner left on. Her mother had a sixth sense for even lingering embers across the house. There was no world in which her mother accidentally let a flame run so big it killed her.
“Don’t worry,” Genevieve said. “I’ve arranged everything.”
The picture Genevieve had chosen for the altar was of her mother as a teenager. It put a dark feeling in the pit of Adeline’s stomach: Her mother in the shape of a girl, sitting behind a Singer machine surrounded by cloth scraps. Her hair was braided down two shoulders like Adeline’s had been last night. She was round-faced with a dimple in one cheek. She looked nothing like herself and nothing like Adeline, except in the eyes.
“That’s where you met,” Adeline said, watching Genevieve arrange it on the stand. She toyed with the burlap patch one of the Sons had given her to pin to the right sleeve of her dress, marking her as the daughter of the deceased. The edges were fraying. She rubbed a finger against it, fraying it more.
“Even when we were girls I could see how much she loved making dresses. She even went to a dressmaking school—Hooi Chin, I think. I haven’t seen her excited like that in a while.” Genevieve smiled slightly, and Adeline felt familiar jealousy. Genevieve was functionally her mother’s only other family. Living with her, Adeline had recognized some of her mother’s gestures in the other woman, realized her mother must have learned it from her. How else did a woman from gang-ridden Chinatown come to run a store that informed the tastes of wealthy wives and Western expats? Genevieve’s society, Genevieve’s connections, borrowing the way Genevieve carried herself. She thought of the night she’d seen them huddled over her mother’s fire. What had Genevieve gotten in return, for all of that?
Unconscious of her scrutiny, Genevieve looked over Adeline’s shoulder.
“Oh, they’re early.”
Adeline turned and stiffened. Tian had shown up, dressed in a white button-down tucked into black cotton pants. She was accompanied by a statuesque Butterfly in a dark brown skirt who was probably a little older, with her long hair loose over her white blouse. Tian introduced her as Christina, Red Butterfly’s tattooist.
“I’ve heard a lot about you,” Christina offered in a surprisingly full voice. She hooked her handbag on her arm to extend her hand. “I’m sorry about your mother. We’re here early to help.”
