Chapter 8

The dinner was arranged for a Saturday evening in the third week of the engagement, and Emiko spent most of the preceding week rehearsing exactly how she would tell her parents, only to abandon every version the moment she was actually sitting across from them at the table.

“Dad, Mom, there’s something I need to tell both of you,” she said finally, over the rice she’d barely touched. “I’ve met a man. We’re just beginning to learn each other, but he’s a highly knowledgeable geneticist — kind, caring, and he treats me like a celadon maebyeong vase. I’m telling you now so that, if you wish to meet him, he’s said he would gladly fly here and let you see how he and I are together.”

Hitori set down his chopsticks slower than usual, studying his daughter’s face rather than her words. Kumiko’s hands had gone still in her lap.

“A geneticist,” her father repeated, testing the word. “How did you meet him?”

“Online, at first. Through mutual research interests.” It wasn’t quite a lie. “We’ve been talking for a long time before either of us called it anything.”

“How long is a long time?”

Emiko hesitated half a second too long, and her mother caught it. “Long enough that I trust him more than I’ve trusted anyone,” she said instead of answering directly. “He’s twenty-eight. American. He speaks Korean — fluently, not textbook Korean, real Korean. He asked if he could fly out and meet you both properly, whenever you’re ready.”

Her father’s expression didn’t soften so much as recalibrate. Twenty-eight was acceptable. A geneticist was acceptable, more than acceptable — something to mention to his colleagues. American was the word he turned over the longest, and Emiko watched him decide not to say anything about it yet, filing it away instead.

“You’ve never brought a boy home,” Kumiko said quietly. Not an accusation. Almost wondering. “Not once. Not even to talk about.”

“I know.”

“Does he treat you well?”

Emiko thought of the word she’d chosen earlier, still not sure it had been the right one to say out loud at a family dinner, and said it anyway. “He treats me like I’m a celadon maebyeong. Something rare. Something you don’t set down carelessly.”

Her mother’s eyes went bright, and for a moment neither parent said anything.

“Bring him,” her father said finally. “Let us see for ourselves what kind of man speaks like that about our daughter.”

Josh flew in the following weekend, and executed every piece of Korean etiquette with a precision that would have unsettled Emiko if she hadn’t already had months to grow used to exactly how thorough he was capable of being. The bow to Hitori was correct to the degree, held a fraction longer than casual, exactly the depth owed to the father of the woman he intended to marry. The bow to Kumiko was different — not deeper, but softer — and in his hands, when he straightened, was a bottle of fifty-year-old scotch for Hitori, and for Kumiko, an impossible bouquet: nine exhibition-grown Korean gukhwa, wine-dark petals unfurling in fine curved threads around centers of muted gold, flown overnight from a private grower outside Seoul.

Kumiko went still.

“Gukhwa,” she said, before he’d said a word, touching one petal as if it might not be real. “Nobody grows them like this anymore. My mother —” She stopped herself, throat working.

“Emiko told me you used to keep a garden of them, when she was very young. Before there wasn’t time,” Josh said, in Korean too clean, too unhurried, honorifics landing exactly where they should. “I thought you should have them again. Even for one evening.”

Kumiko didn’t answer right away. She held the flowers the way a person holds something they’d stopped letting themselves want.

Emiko watched her mother’s composure crack for the first time in longer than she could remember, and felt something twist in her own chest — gratitude, and underneath it, so quiet she almost missed it, a flicker of how did he know that. She hadn’t remembered telling him about the garden herself. She wasn’t sure she ever had.