Chapter 2
“Please focus on the charm over my shoulder,” I say.
Gemma’s gaze shifts to the little jade bird hanging on a cord of red silk from the ceiling, hovering just behind me, and I wait for the moment her features relax.
My eyes skim her face, landing on each spot briefly—eyes, nose, mouth, chin, cheeks. “You have a very symmetrical face, which implies harmony.”
Gemma smiles a smile that is automatic for someone who is complimented about her beauty regularly. “Thank you.”
“Your brows have a high arch—cleverness.” Another polite smile from Gemma.
I take in her eyes. “Your eyes are close-set, which implies suspicion. You don’t trust easily.
” The smile stays on her face but doesn’t reach her eyes.
“You need someone honest, someone who will not play games.” It’s the first time there’s a break in her composure, a little wobble. I know I’ve hit on something real.
“Your nose implies fortune,” I say, not giving the reason—large nostrils. “And your wide mouth indicates generosity. Whoever you end up with will be entrusted with both your heart and finances.”
There’s a beat of silence and then she lets out another low, nervous laugh.
“And now I’ll just be reading silently, so please sit through the initial discomfort.” I try and sound warm when I say it, and not like a gynecologist. I look at her again.
As my focus becomes laser sharp, it happens.
The room around me dissolves. And with neck-snapping speed, I find myself on a busy street.
Filled with horse-drawn carriages and people rushing around me, dust kicked up from the dirt-packed road.
The scent of horses and trash and food mingle together in a way that screams “before modern-day plumbing.”
A quick look at the outfits—hats on the men, bustles on the women—and I know I’m in a turn-of-the-century city.
There’s a boy nearby holding up a newspaper and yelling something in Spanish.
The sound of horses clopping is overwhelming and I try to orient myself, to ground myself and not feel overwhelmed by what’s surrounding me.
I look up at the sky—blue behind all the industrial smoke—and take big breaths. When I look back around me, I see her.
Gemma, or whoever she is in this lifetime, is rushing down the street, dodging the busy traffic.
She’s wearing a long brown-patterned dress with a bustle and a dusty-rose velvet bonnet with black ribbons floating behind her as she dashes down the sidewalk.
I follow her, careful to keep my eyes on her hat.
She eventually pops into a shop—a dressmaker, the cheerful bell above the door chiming as she sweeps inside.
And, as if I’m watching a movie, I am now in the shop, too.
Gemma is behind the glossy wood counter, busy putting on a striped apron over her dress, speaking rapidly to another woman in Spanish, and they are both laughing.
I catch her reflection in a mirror, and it’s the face of a different woman.
Our past lives don’t embody identical bodies, but while I’m here, I am able to see them as I know them.
No matter how many readings I’ve done, the magic of this never ever gets old.
I look at the details of the shop—the neat rows of colorful thread behind the counter.
The glass display case filled with various sewing notions.
The open cupboard filled with spools of ribbon—thick velvet, creamy lace, saturated grosgrain, pastel satin. I want to reach out and touch them.
The bell chimes again and the chatter stops.
Gemma stares at the man who has walked in. He’s got salt-and-pepper gray hair and impeccable tailoring. Before I can process him, a woman enters and lays her hand on his arm. Gemma looks away, her face red.
And then.
A strand of glowing red thread unspools from her hand, wrapping around her wrist, until it finds its way to the man, and wraps around his wrist. No one sees this but me. The red thread of fate.
I know I have about ten seconds, so I focus on the man’s face—following the map of patterns on his features until I feel it. The tug in my chest, the click of recognition.
And then as quick as a blink, I’m out and back in the room with Gemma. It takes a few seconds for me to adjust and wait out the wave of nausea. The jade cuff I’m wearing on my right wrist is warm.
“Your future has been laid out in my mind’s eye,” I finally say, placing my hands in my lap. “And in it, I’ve found your match.” The words are so familiar to me that I barely register saying them as I twist my still-warm bracelet around my wrist.
“You have?” Gemma is both hopeful and skeptical.
Dispelling people of this skepticism gives me a high that’s better than any drug. “Give us one week and we’ll find you an array of potential matches.”
When Gemma leaves, I head to Halmoni’s office, which is next to the reading room upstairs. Her office is where a crucial part of our process happens. I find all the Park women gathered there, drinking coffee. All their shoes have been kicked off.
I hand Halmoni my cuff and she wraps her delicate fingers around it.
All of us wear a piece of jewelry made of jade: Sunny wears dangling stones in her ears, Emoni a pendant on a necklace, and Halmoni a ring.
These pieces of jewelry—they’ve been forged from the same piece of jade handed down in our family.
And they all hold the same power. Every woman in my family is born with the same gift I have—inexplicable yet reliable: the ability to see past lives and past loves.
Halmoni’s eyes close as she holds my bracelet. “Yes, you found him.”
Behind her large redwood desk is a floor-to-ceiling apothecary cupboard—a piece of furniture that has been in our family for centuries.
Halmoni opens one of the drawers and pulls out a piece of paper, handmade by Emoni, an almost-transparent sheet.
The “recipe” for the paper has been passed down through our family as well.
Regular old paper will not do for this job.
Halmoni places the bracelet on the scrap of delicate paper and we watch as a name appears, stitched in red thread:
Peter Cruz
“Gotcha,” I whisper. Halmoni picks up the scrap of paper and places it back in the drawer.
On the placard placed on the front of the little drawer, I write Gemma’s name.
This piece of paper will be kept in the drawer for as long as the courtship, until we know the match has been successful: when the red thread turns white—the final step before we take the name out of its drawer and place it in our archives, a compartment in the back of the cupboard, hidden by a false back.
“I’ll get the interns on finding Peter,” I say, putting my bracelet back on. When I reach Lila’s and Matteo’s desks, they each have about three devices open, toggling between all of them.
“Gemma Flores is our newest client,” I say, grabbing a Post-it off one of the desks. They gasp. “I know, I know. We have to be discreet, okay?” They nod.
“I just did her reading and we’re looking for a ‘Peter Cruz’ to add to her matches.
Los Angeles.” I write the name down and hand it to Lila.
This would seem like an impossible task—to find a single human in the entire world.
But what my family has learned over the centuries is that fateds always wind up in the same area lifetime after lifetime.
They cannot help but be drawn to each other.
That helps us narrow it down incredibly.
And the one thing I’ve learned with interns is that there is no human being that a twenty-three-year-old cannot find.
Well, almost no human being.
“Peter Cruz,” Lila repeats out loud, looking at the Post-it. “Sounds hot.”
No one else at the agency knows how we get these names. They think we draw it from some database that only the founders have access to. It’s taken as part of the whole “secret sauce” vibe of this business.
The secret sauce being, of course, the gift that runs through the women in my family.
“God, I wish we could post this on socials,” Matteo complains. Then he slides a look at me. “Too bad.”
We don’t have a social media presence, at my grandmother’s insistence.
The secret behind our matches must be protected at all costs—even if it means missing out on an entire customer base.
Also, the shamanistic roots of our business might rub some in the Korean community the wrong way.
There’s a bit of fear and stigma surrounding some of these ancient traditions.
Our altar, for example, would freak some people out.
“Actually I’ve been meaning to talk to you about social media,” I say to the interns. They both perk up comically, like cats hearing a can opening. “Create an Instagram account. Let’s test it out.”
Matteo clutches his chest. “For real?” Lila is unnaturally still, as if she doesn’t want to scare me off.
“For real,” I say. Then lower my voice. “Keep it on the down-low, just between us. Basic info and imagery. No posting about Gemma, obviously. Create an initial grid and then review it with me by end of day, okay?”
They nod enthusiastically, and as I walk away I hear them squealing.
When I get back to my office, I see that Gemma’s already emailed me.
Thank you so much for that incredible experience. You’ve made me a believer! xx G
I remember the moment when amusement turned to hope in Gemma’s expression. The complete vulnerability of saying you believe in love.
It’s the common denominator between everyone who comes to One & Only, the thing that ties everyone together.
Ties us together.
The jade cuff feels warm on my wrist once again. Everyone has big feelings about big birthdays, so mine are nothing new. But for me, forty marks ten years of knowing who I’m supposed to be with.
And ten years of not being able to find him.
Halmoni’s not in her office when I creep in. The sunlight filters through a row of fig trees planted outside the bank of windows, and shines onto the apothecary cupboard.
I find the drawer with my name on it: Cassia Park
Third row from the top, almost dead center. I pull the drawer out, beautifully lined with red floral-patterned silk. A small scrap of paper lies right in the middle. The edges have curled slightly so I need to flatten it out on the table to read the name stitched into it:
Daniel Nam
I’ve seen it a hundred times, and yet something still stutters inside of me when I read his name.
This was the name Halmoni drew for me. At my insistence, I had never let my grandmother or aunts do a reading for me.
My mom got her face read at a young age and it led her to rebelling and dating my deadbeat dad—a fate I wanted to avoid.
But when I turned thirty, after a terrible breakup with yet another damn musician, I asked my grandmother to read my face and enter my past life.
Almost ten years I’ve known my fated is Daniel. Ten years of searching for him.
All our methods here at the agency have come up with nothing.
At first, it wasn’t a big deal. I’m only thirty!
Be patient. What am I, a child bride? At that age, marriage and children were nebulous desires.
But the one clear goal I’ve had is this: I want to be so in love that the entire world around me dissolves.
I want to go through life with someone beside me.
My mother died young, and I don’t take this future available to me for granted.
With my thirties coming to a close, I’ve spent the past year doubling down on my efforts.
Shreya has this side gig that is Daniel Nam focused—she’s working with a private investigator and sends me updates every week.
This week’s update was the same as the last. I’m trying to stay determined—but a feeling of restlessness has been growing.
Because beyond having a partner, I want to feel that magic. The magic of falling in love with the person whose fate has been intertwined with mine many lives over—overcoming time and space and all else.
I want to begin a love so fated that it is inevitable.
And it’s not lost on me that I’m the last woman in the family with the gift.
Sunny has no children, and Emoni only had two sons, and they only had sons, by some goddamned curse (I love those boys, it’s fine).
With my possibly last male relative, Wally, born only eight months ago, it’s getting increasingly clear to me that if I don’t have children, the gift might be lost. So that once-nebulous desire to build a family has become clearer.
It’s here now. I guess I really am growing older because I truly cannot believe it’s snuck up on me like this.
This big decision that had always felt so far away.
Forty. A milestone birthday for many, but especially heavy with expectation for me.
Maybe this will be the year. A milestone gift for a milestone birthday. I close the drawer and carry this hope close—willing it into the world with yearning alone.