Chapter 8
The last time Ava brought someone home to meet her parents, she’d been twenty-two and convinced she was in love with a philosophy major named Brad who insisted Sartre could only be understood while high.
That dinner ended with her mother asking if Brad had suffered a head injury as a child.
This would be worse.
“Stop fidgeting,” Victor said from the driver’s seat as they cruised through Queens.
He’d traded his usual charcoal suit for something softer: navy blue, no tie, the top button of his white shirt undone.
It should have made him look more approachable.
Instead, it just made him look like a model pretending to be casual.
The September evening painted everything gold, but Ava barely noticed.
She smoothed her dress for the twentieth time.
She’d changed outfits three times before Victor had physically removed her from her closet, declaring the simple blue dress “adequate for meeting parents who already know you’re coming. ”
“I’m not fidgeting.”
“You’ve adjusted that same spot forty-three times since we left Manhattan.”
“You’re counting?”
“I count everything about you.” The admission came out quiet. Unexpected. He cleared his throat, eyes fixed on the road. “Your parents are lovely, I’m sure.”
She turned to stare at him. Victor Morningstar, ancient demon and senior partner, looked genuinely nervous. A muscle twitched near his jaw.
“They’re going to ask about grandchildren,” she warned. “My mother’s been planning my wedding since I was five. She has a Pinterest board.”
“How thorough can a Pinterest board be?”
“Three thousand pins organized by season, color scheme, and lunar phase.”
He gripped the wheel tighter. “Lunar phase?”
“Optimal lighting for wedding photos.” Her phone buzzed. Another text from her mother. A string of baby emojis followed by question marks. “Oh God. She’s already picking nursery colors.”
“Perhaps we should have kept the Le Bernardin reservation.”
“Too late now.”
The neighborhood shifted around them as they drove deeper into Queens, Manhattan’s sharp edges softening into familiar streets.
Corner bodegas with hand-painted signs. Laundromats spilling warm air onto sidewalks.
The particular chaos of Northern Boulevard, where four different languages competed on every block of storefronts.
This was where she’d grown up. Where she’d done homework in the restaurant’s back booth while her parents worked eighteen-hour days. Where her grandmother had taught her to fold dumplings, patient fingers guiding her clumsy ones, stories flowing in Mandarin about fox spirits and hungry ghosts.
Feng’s Kitchen came into view, and her shoulders dropped despite her nerves.
Cheerful red awning, faded just enough to show its age.
The golden dragon sign her father had commissioned when she was seven, gleaming in the evening light.
Through the windows, she could see the familiar bustle: servers weaving between tables, steam rising from the kitchen pass, her parents’ life’s work in motion.
The smell hit her when Victor opened his door. Ginger. Garlic. The particular sweetness of char siu roasting. Fifteen years of memories wrapped in one breath.
Fifteen years. The same amount of time Lilith claimed to have been “nurturing arrangements.”
Ava pushed the thought away. Tonight was about Victor meeting her parents. Tomorrow she could panic about demon conspiracies.
Victor parked with the precision of someone calculating escape routes, sliding the Tesla into a space that shouldn’t have fit. He studied the restaurant through the windshield, his expression unreadable.
“Any last-minute warnings?”
“Don’t mention Peter Chang’s. Dad keeps a mental list of every customer who’s ever said they have better soup dumplings. He’s still not speaking to my cousin Jeffrey.”
“How long ago was that?”
“2019.” She unbuckled her seatbelt. “Also, Mom will try to feed you until you burst. It’s how she shows love. Refusing seconds is basically saying you hate her.”
“Noted.” He paused, hand on the door. “Ava. I want them to like me.”
“Just be yourself.” She reconsidered. “Maybe a slightly less ancient, demonic version of yourself.”
“I’ll do my best.”
He came around to open her door. His hand settled on her back as they walked toward the restaurant, and the familiar warmth made her mark pulse beneath her dress.
The bell above the door chimed, and her mother materialized before it stopped ringing.
Mei-Lin Feng stood barely five feet tall, but she radiated enough energy to fill a stadium.
Her hair was pulled back in its perpetual practical bun, a few gray strands she refused to dye escaping near her temples.
Her apron, the good one, Ava noticed, with the embroidered dragons, was spotless despite the dinner rush.
“Ava! You’re late! I’ve been holding table twelve for an hour!” Her eyes locked onto Victor with laser focus. “This is him? The boyfriend who appeared from nowhere after years of ‘I’m too busy for dating, Ma’?”
“Mom…”
“He’s tall.” She circled Victor like a shark evaluating prey. “Good bone structure. Excellent posture.” She stopped in front of him, craning her neck to meet his eyes. “Are those real Italian shoes?”
“Mrs. Feng.” Victor executed a slight bow that somehow managed to be both formal and charming. “Thank you for having me. Your restaurant is lovely.”
Her mother studied him. “You practice that in the car?”
“Extensively.”
A smile cracked across her face, the real one, not the polite version she gave customers. “I like honest men. Come, come.” She raised her voice toward the kitchen, cutting through the dinner noise like a blade. “Robert! Our daughter brought the mysterious boyfriend!”
Her father emerged from the kitchen, wiping his hands on his apron.
Where her mother was hurricane energy, her father was steady earth: slower, quieter, but immovable once he’d made up his mind.
Robert Feng had the kind of face that revealed nothing until he wanted it to.
He studied Victor with the same careful attention he gave to perfecting a new recipe.
“Mr. Feng.” Victor extended his hand. “It’s an honor.”
Her father’s handshake lasted exactly three seconds. Ava counted. Long enough to be respectful. Short enough to withhold judgment.
“You treat my daughter well?”
“I try to.”
“Trying is not doing.”
“Dad…” Ava started, but Victor touched her arm.
“You’re right,” he said. “I should say instead that your daughter makes me want to be better than I’ve ever been. Whether I succeed is her choice to make.”
Her parents exchanged one of those married-couple looks that contained entire conversations.
Her mother nodded once. “Sit, sit! I made all of Ava’s favorites.”
The table was in the back corner, the one reserved for family celebrations, for Lunar New Year feasts and graduation dinners and the quiet meals after her grandmother’s funeral. Red tablecloth, slightly faded. The ceramic lazy Susan her grandmother had brought from Beijing.
It was already laden with enough food for twelve people.
Beijing duck with paper-thin pancakes, the skin lacquered and glistening.
Mapo tofu swimming in scarlet oil, Sichuan peppercorns visible like tiny landmines.
Jade-green bok choy with garlic, still sizzling from the wok.
And soup dumplings, her father’s specialty, releasing fragrant steam from their delicate pleats.
“This is too much, Mom.”
“Nothing is too much for my only daughter who might finally give me grandchildren before I die.”
“You’re fifty-two and run half-marathons.”
“I could die any day. My friend Linda’s cousin had a heart attack at forty-eight. While doing yoga!” She poured tea with the efficiency of ten thousand repetitions. “Victor, do you want children?”
Ava choked on her tea.
Victor barely blinked. “I hadn’t considered it until recently. My work hasn’t left much room for family.”
“What changed?” her father asked, serving duck with surgical precision: exactly three slices per pancake, not one more.
Victor looked at Ava. His eyes caught the warm restaurant light wrong, amber bleeding into his pupils for just a moment.
“Everything.”
Her mother made a sound that could have been approval or the opening salvo of an interrogation.
“Where did you go to school?”
“Harvard Law.”
“Good, good. Harvard is respectable. Where do you live?”
“Manhattan. I own a penthouse.”
Her mother’s eyes gleamed. “Manhattan real estate. Very good.” A pause, recalculating. “Can you cook?”
“I’m learning.”
“I’ll teach you. Ava needs someone who can cook. She burns water.”
“That was one time!”
Her father hadn’t stopped studying Victor throughout the exchange.
He ate slowly, methodically, but his eyes missed nothing: noting when Victor served others before himself, when he refilled Ava’s tea without being asked, when his hand found hers under the table during her mother’s more aggressive questions.
“How long have you been seeing our daughter?”
“Not long,” Victor admitted. “But sometimes you know right away when something matters.”
“And Ava matters?”
“More than I can adequately express.”
Her father served more duck. Considering. The silence stretched. Her mother, for once, didn’t fill it.
“Do you love her?”
The restaurant noise faded, leaving only this table, this question, this moment.
Victor set down his chopsticks with deliberate care.
“Yes,” he said simply. “I do.”
The kitchen clattered on around them. Her mother’s kettle hovered mid-pour. Her father’s chopsticks had stopped moving.
Victor met her father’s eyes without flinching. “I know how that sounds, coming from someone you’ve just met. But you asked a direct question, and I’m giving you a direct answer.”
Her father studied him for a long moment. Then he served more duck onto Victor’s plate, a gesture Ava recognized. Acceptance, provisional but real.
“Good,” her father said. “A man should know his own heart.”