The Jins have been moli clients of ours for generations, and Missy sought out my mother when she’d moved to Vancouver. After I’d left home, Mom concocted a story about how she’d generously allowed me to take time to follow my own craft before joining her to take my proper place as a Hua daughter. The lie hid the fact that I had no moli, and saved my pride, and hers.
I chat with Missy Jin as Rafe looks on without speaking. When Iwas younger, I had hugely gratifying fantasies about seeing Rafe again and what I’d say when I did. All of them resulted in a triumphant Lucy staring down a chastised Rafe, who would beg for forgiveness I wouldn’t grant. This gave me a lot of solace, until one day it did nothing but leave me drained. I’d burned out on the witty, cutting things I’d pictured saying and on those scenarios that kept him alive in my mind. Slowly, the embers cooled, although the relief it brought was the release that came with being able to accept the pain, not from the disappearance of pain itself.
His crime had been relatively minor in the grand scheme of life. I know this. He was my first kiss. The Jins had come over to our house the day before they left for their annual trip to visit family in China. Rafe and I escaped as usual into the back garden, while our parents complained about the exchange rate and Dad joked about Mom working too hard in the store.
I was twenty, and so was Rafe, and I’d been telling him my news. “Mom says it’s time to pick the date for my moli ceremony,” I said, and I remember bouncing with excitement for my life to really begin.
Rafe nodded as I talked, and when I shivered from the damp, he wrapped his arm around me in a way that felt…different. I looked up and he looked down, and neither of us spoke.
As we stood in the misty garden in the shadow of the dark pines, my eyes went to his mouth. Perhaps if I’d been watching his eyes, I would have saved myself a world of heartbreak. I might have seen the warning to step back and away. Instead, I gathered my courage to do what I’d wanted to do for years.
I kissed him.
It was nothing more than my dry lips pressed on his, but those few seconds, brief but infinite, made me feel like I wasn’t alone in the desire that had been with me for so long it was like a phantom limb, aching and impossible to soothe.
Or so I thought—until he put his hands on my shoulders andleaned away. “I’m sorry, Lucy,” he said, eyes moving from my face to somewhere past my shoulder. “I don’t think this is a good idea.”
“What? Why?”
He stepped back, hands running through his hair. “There’s no room for me in your life right now.”
“Sure there is.”
“No, look how busy you are. That ceremony is all you’ve been talking about for days.”
I was the one to move away then. “Because it’s a big deal?”
“I know it is.”
“Rafe—”
He wouldn’t let me finish, his words like an avalanche, fast and relentless. “I’m sorry. I thought I could handle this. I’m happy for you, I swear, but all I can think about is that I like how we are right now. I don’t want things to change.”
The shaking that came from deep inside caused my teeth to chatter. “You mean you don’t wantmeto change.”
He kept shaking his head until I wanted to reach out and hold him still. “It’s not you, it’s me. What you have is so big it casts a shadow over everything. I look at your dad and your brother and I’m worried I’ll end up the same—bitter and left out.”
“Don’t talk about my family like that.” It was true, though, and my stomach clenched in humiliation that he’d noticed.
“I’m sorry. I don’t want to hurt you, but you should be with someone who can support you in the way you deserve. I don’t think I can be that guy.”
He might have had more to say, but I’d heard enough. I don’t think I ran back to the house, but I must have, because I remember panting as I reached the door. He was the person I thought I could count on no matter what, who would accept me for what I was—and he hadn’t.
Dinner was spent in a cold bath of shame and confusion as I sat across from him. His bergamot-and-tobacco smell—one of myexperiments he’d claimed for his own the second he smelled it on me six months before—lingered in my nose, and I felt smaller and sadder each time Rafe’s gaze snapped down to his fork to avoid my own.
He left without a word, following his parents out the door to a chorus of best wishes for safe travel. The next day, the Jins left the country. Rafe didn’t call to say goodbye, and pride prevented me from contacting him first. The chance of another devastating rejection was too intense for me to bear. After nights tossing and turning and wondering if my moli was only an excuse—Maybe I smelled? Or I was too desperate? Too ugly?—the mortification slowly transformed into resentment.
There was no room for him in my life? That was a lie. He didn’t want me to change and grow. He wanted to keep me at his level instead of seeing how far I could go. Screw him. If that was the kind of person he was, I didn’t need him. At all.
This was enough to drive me back to my work. It was time to choose my huo symbol and create my first moli perfume. I would take my rightful place in the great pantheon of talented Hua women, and I didn’t need Rafe to do it.
I spent hours sitting with my mother and grandmother in the laboratory, doing my best to not relive that moment in the garden when everything had changed. They told me stories of scents they’d made and kept me busy with tests—create the smell of dry grass before a wildfire, blend these accords together to make something new—all in preparation of me becoming a worthy addition to our line. The gift of the fifth daughters has always been the most lucrative, by orders of magnitude. It was up to me to bring about a reinvigorated Hua family, backed by wealth and its analog, power. It was up to me to earn the money to properly invest in Yixiang. That was what I needed to focus on. Not a boy or my hurt feelings. I had a responsibility to fulfill.
Then I was the first Hua woman to fail in a thousand years. Icouldn’t measure up to the expectations of my own family, the same way I hadn’t been enough, or possibly too much, for Rafe.
“I should let you go,” says Ms. Jin now. She smiles. “Try to get some rest, and call if you or your mother need us.”
She turns away, and Rafe looks like he wants to say something. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Kelsey waving, and as he opens his mouth, I say, “Excuse me, my sister-in-law needs me.”
