“Ava, please, whatever it takes to get you here, I’ll do it. We’re at an impasse.”
How strange is this? Ava thought. She had met Michael Lee exactly once, and then for only a few minutes in a Hong Kong restaurant, and now he was inviting, almost begging her into his life.
Ava was the younger daughter in their father Marcus Lee’s second family. He had married three times, and in the tradition of wealthy Chinese men, supported and loved each of his families. His first wife had given him four sons, of whom Michael was the eldest. It was understood that Marcus’s business and the bulk of his wealth would ultimately reside with the first family, and that Michael would become head of the entire clan if anything happened to Marcus.
Ava’s mother, Jennie, had given Marcus two daughters and a volatile relationship. It had become so fractious that Marcus eventually moved them to Vancouver, a city Jennie Lee couldn’t abide. She’d lasted two years there before taking Ava and her sister, Marian, to Toronto, where the girls were raised and educated. Marcus eventually had taken a third wife. She had given him two more children, a girl and a boy, and they now lived in Australia.
Jennie Lee had never worked. Marcus bought them a house and cars, paid the bills, and looked after the girls’ educations. He still talked to Jennie every day, and he visited Canada every year for a two-week stay. This year had been unusual. He had joined Jennie, Ava, Marian, and Marian’s husband and two daughters on a two-week cruise through the southern Caribbean, and then returned to Toronto to stay for another week with Jennie. He was still at her house, in the suburb of Richmond Hill to the north.
Ava’s mother had never been jealous about the first family. She knew that the first wife and her family would always be pre-eminent. All she asked was that Marcus be fair in his treatment of her and the girls. And he always had been. He talked to Jennie about his four sons from the first marriage, so she knew about them and had made their names known to Ava and Marian. But none of them had ever met until the week before.
The thing that Ava didn’t know was how open Marcus Lee was about her and Marian with the rest of his extended family. She would have assumed that Michael knew they existed, but it was still a surprise when he approached her in the Hong Kong restaurant and said he recognized her from pictures their father had shown him. He had known exactly who she was, and he seemed eager to start a relationship.
Ava found it unsettling. It was one thing to understand and accept the complicated layers of Marcus Lee’s life and to know where you fit among them. It was another to confront the physical reality of someone who until then had been just a name, just a shadow.
“Michael, I got home only yesterday. I’ve been on the road for more than a week. Is there anything I can do from here?” she said.
He hesitated.
She sighed. “Email the contract to me and I’ll look at it right away.”
“It’s all very basic stuff. I don’t see how that can help.”
“Michael, let me be the judge of that. After I’ve gone through it we can talk.”
“Okay,” he said, still sounding reluctant.
“And by the way, how much does Daddy actually know about your problem?”
“Why do you ask?”
“I expect I’ll be talking to him today. I don’t want to be indiscreet.”
“He knows about the size of it but I haven’t discussed all the details.”
“Then neither will I.”
“Thank you.”
“Look, I promise I’ll read the contract as soon as I get it, and then we can talk,” she said.
“I’ll email it right away and I’ll call when I get back from this function. It will be around midnight.”
Ava closed the phone. The sun was glistening off the windows of the condos across the street, taking, she imagined, the chill out of the spring air. It was her favourite time of year in Canada: the world coming to life, full of promise. The last thing she felt like doing was getting on another plane for Hong Kong. After scurrying around Wuhan in China, London, Denmark, Dublin, New York, and then London again,