Chapter 8 Chanel
Chanel
Exactly ten minutes after Ares leaves, my phone buzzes over the table, Jamie’s name lighting up my screen.
Perfect timing.
I hastily wipe the cumin powder and grease from my fingers, then pick up the phone, sandwiching it between my ear and shoulder.
“Hello?”
“Okay, so, like, that took me way longer than I thought—the guy might as well be a spy or something—but I’ve got what you asked for,” Jamie says.
Finally. My heart skips in anticipation. “Yes? Tell me everything you know.”
“To start with . . .” She lowers her voice, and I brace myself, breath catching in my throat, waiting for the bombshell to
drop. Maybe he’s under witness protection. Or he’s an assassin, if those even still exist in the modern world. Or he’s on
the run from assassins—“He’s a Virgo.”
“I’m sorry?”
“He’s a Virgo,” she repeats, like it’s a life-altering revelation, no less significant than if she were to discover that Ares Yin was secretly
descended from a royal family.
“Huh.” I absorb this for a moment, and store the information for later. “Okay, I won’t lie, that is kind of surprising.”
“I also found one of the girls he supposedly had a fling with two summers ago,” she adds. “Do you want to search her up?”
My body’s reaction surprises me—the intensity of it, the immediate sour taste filling my mouth. I feel myself recoil, the
muscles in my stomach clenching instinctively as if someone’s just threatened to punch me. “Sure,” I say, because this should
be helpful. Finding out his type, whatever it is. It shouldn’t bother me at all.
“Type in Suzy Liu, with three Us,” she instructs. “Her profile’s the one with her wearing a blue sundress on a balcony—you see it?”
I take a deep breath and do as I’m told. After a few seconds, her feed loads on my phone screen. Bright pops of color, flashes
of smooth, sun-kissed skin, generic but aesthetic photos of picnics at the beach and brunches with friends, the neatest arrangement
of freckles I’ve ever seen on a human being.
“She’s really pretty,” I comment in an attempt to be objective.
I scroll slowly down through all fifty-seven of her posts, taking as much care as someone defusing a bomb to not let my fingers brush the Like button by accident.
She’s pretty in a different way from me—not overly dolled up, not trying too hard.
Just subtle eyeshadow that suits her softer features and what looks like naturally wavy hair, fluffed by the ocean breeze. No fillers. No filters, even.
Is that what Ares is into? I make a note to start switching up my makeup style.
“What else did you find?” I prompt. “What about his family?”
“Right, right, I’m getting there,” she says. “I had to ask a friend—well, that might be a bit generous, let’s just say an
old classmate—to dive into old hospital records, but they managed to find him. He was born in the States, in New York, and
his mother was an economics professor.”
“His mother was an economics professor?” I say, catching the past tense. “What’s she doing now?”
A pause. “She’s not doing anything now, because she’s dead.”
“Wait. What?”
“Yeah, she died giving birth to him,” she says, not unsympathetically, but with the causal tone of someone rehashing the plot
of a movie. “Kind of depressing.”
I feel my heart clench. I almost don’t hear what she says next, because I’m suddenly picturing Ares as a child. Alone. Helpless.
“. . . and his father’s based in Beijing, but he seems to fly out all the time. His father also has another son called Luke.
The mother was a former assistant of his, but they never married, and she suddenly transferred to one of the company’s other
offices around the same time she would’ve been pregnant, so I’m assuming it was a one-night stand kind of situation.”
“Luke?” I repeat. The name doesn’t ring any bells at all, but I remember how Ares had trailed off before. “To protect . .
. ,” he’d started. Was that who he was talking about? Why his father had signed him up for boxing? “I didn’t even realize he had a brother. He doesn’t go to Airington, does he?”
“No. They filed a missing person report for him three years ago, and they still haven’t found him. Qin, are you sure you want to be with him?” Jamie says suddenly. “Because, like, not going to lie, his whole family situation sounds super
messed up.”
I’m not sure of anything anymore, but there’s this pull in my gut, a suspicion that I might have just found a critical piece
to the puzzle I’ve been trying to solve since that first night. Luke. Missing person report. Three years ago.
But the more pieces I collect, the more terrified I am of how the picture will look once it’s finally complete.
After I hang up, I walk down to the lake alone.
On the outside, the park appears so blissfully normal. The aunties heading home on their electric bikes, pink scarves wrapped
around their necks to fend off the evening chill, their arms practically melded to the front handle underneath thick polka-dotted
blankets. The more sociable aunties practicing the choreography for their courtyard dance routine, gossiping with each other
about someone called Lao Wang and Xiao Li and their new son-in-law as they swing their hips and swish their fans. The old
men huddled underneath the cool white glow of the streetlights. Navy caps on, sometimes a pipe dangling between their teeth,
faces somber with concentration as they watch a game of Chinese chess unfold over stone boards, hands behind their backs except
to point out an obvious move.
Then I arrive at the lake’s edge, waiting. Watching. At first I can only see the moonlight pooling over the water, but when the moon reaches its highest point, the illusion of normalcy shatters.
I suck in a breath as the silver light ripples against the darkness, strange shapes emerging over the surface.
My heart strains against my chest, everything in my body suspended with both horror and hope. Please, I pray. I want so desperately to believe that the vision has changed already, that it’ll show me dancing at prom instead,
smiling up at Ares, crowns gleaming on our heads. That after spending all that time with him, after the way he’d watched me
while I tried on the dress, after the puppy, and the dinner, there’s a chance he’ll come around. . . .
But then the shapes clarify slowly into the vision from my nightmares, and my stomach drops. Whatever I’ve done, it wasn’t
enough. It’s still the same house engulfed in smoke and fire. The vision is even clearer than before. There are now two new
figures in the periphery of the frame.
A middle-aged man with a crescent-shaped scar on his cheek, and a younger boy, standing next to him, his features twisted
with panic. Maybe fourteen or fifteen at most. He looks familiar, though I’m certain I’ve never met this boy in my life.
The man looks familiar too, but in a different way. Like a face from a magazine cover or an old photo, someplace I’ve seen
before . . . but where? He’s around my dad’s age, and from his suit-and-tie look, he would certainly fit into one of his circles.
He could be any of the businessmen I’ve made small talk with at my dad’s functions.
Maybe that, then?
I inch closer to the lake until my feet are perched on the very edge, trying to commit the man’s face to memory—and to look
for more clues, anything that will help me make sense of this.
But all I can focus on is the crimson moon, hanging in the sky like a blood-stained clock. A reminder that I have just a couple
weeks left.
Mere weeks to completely alter my fate.
Mere weeks to stop Ares.
That night, I fall onto my bed, my stomach pressed flat against the duvet, and open up a new chat with Ares. Normally, I would
wait longer after adding a guy on WeChat before messaging him, to avoid seeming too eager, but I can’t afford to waste any
time.
I stare at the blank square of Ares’s profile, my thumbs hovering over the screen, my pulse thrumming. I shouldn’t be nervous. It’s just a message, and I’ve already planned out what I’m going to say, right down to the punctuation.
But I still find myself taking in a deep, shaky breath before typing out:
hey, have u seen my bracelet??
Then I quickly hit Send before I can overthink it.
I’m rewarded at once with the familiar chime of the WeChat notification. A grin flashes across my face—until I read his reply.
Just two words: what bracelet?
Not the most enthusiastic, sure. But, I reason with myself, a reply is still a reply. Now it’s my move again. I can’t reply right away, though—it would make it seem like I’ve been waiting around for him with my phone glued to my hand like some sort of lovesick loser without better things to do.
And I do have better—or at least more pressing—things to do. So I force myself to set my phone down flat on the pillow and head into
the living room. I crouch down by the cabinets, rifling through them until I find what I’m looking for: our photo album collection.
With an unpleasant pang that feels too close to nostalgia, I remember my dad’s insistence that physical photos just feel better than scrolling through images on a phone screen.
I’d made fun of him for it before, but I have to admit that I’m glad to have the albums here, each of them neatly and methodically
labeled by hand, the blue ink starting to fade in places. Chanel Childhood Photos Ages 0 to 3. Honeymoon Trip One. Honeymoon Trip Two. Honeymoon Trip Three. Family Photos. Cao Yunchen’s
Business Photos 2015 to 2019. Modeling Photos 2015 to 2016. High School Photos.