Romy left Alexandra in the old blue chair reading Faust to Wilhelm. She didn’t have the heart to tell her granddaughter her Opa had never much cared for Goethe. Rather, he had read it with the child in her middle school years to help her perfect her German, only because it was on the curriculum at the Goethe Institute.

So many tiny mistruths she’d never corrected.

Romy had been curious about Goethe when she was a schoolgirl in Shanghai. Her papa said Goethe hated Jews, but her French education in China taught Romy nothing was so clear cut. She’d received an A+ for an essay during her matriculation year, arguing Mephistopheles was a victim of circumstance. Now, perhaps, she’d make the case that Mephistopheles was a survivor.

Lately, when Romy drifted off to sleep, she heard voices calling out to her from the past. She’d smell petrol and blood, feel glass cut her feet as she fought her way through a crowd clawing at her clothes.

Benjamin would step forwards from the mist and crowds, face covered in blood, begging, ‘Please…’ Her mother, father and Daniel stood behind her, arms linked with their eyes closed, revealing nothing. There was also a Chinese family. Two parents, an older boy and a girl. Over all this swirling noise, a baby was squalling.

Desperate.

The Chinese family refused to look at Romy. Disappointment radiated out through the mist, melting the figures until she awoke…

Romy had long ago made her own Faustian pact.

The trouble was that she was no longer the only person suffering the consequences.

Romy crept outside to the garden, through the oak Moon Gate Wilhelm had made for their fiftieth wedding anniversary, and felt her heart swell and hammer with love and guilt.

She was heading to her home clinic to fix some herbs for Alexandra. After a week back in Melbourne, the girl still had a dry cough, a mottled tongue and dull eyes, and Romy wanted to make up a proper tincture for her. She stepped gingerly across square pavers set into soft grass and bent for the key hidden under a terracotta pot planted with jade. As she opened the door to her clinic, swirling dust specks and the faint trace of incense greeted her. She flicked on a light and swiped more dust off the frame surrounding her diploma of Traditional Chinese Medicine, then ran her foot over the few speckles of off-white paint that had escaped the drop sheet and stained the floor forever.

She could never bring herself to scrape them away. Her heart ached.

Wilhelm had built this studio for Romy to celebrate her graduation. Late one summer afternoon, when the painting was done, Nina and Wilhelm had sat in ripped shirts and pants, sipping champagne and toasting their good luck.

Sophia had been seven at the time, hair in neat pigtails and eager to help. Wilhelm, always the soft touch, couldn’t deny her. An old shirt was found and pulled over her little green jumpsuit, and she was given instructions to paint the back of the door, despite Romy’s protestations.

‘She’ll make a mess of it.’

‘Then we’ll clean it up,’ Wilhelm said gently, ruffling his daughter’s black hair.

Sophia had thrown her head back with glee and scuttled off to find the biggest brush, then dipped it in the pot and dribbled it in a long line back to the door, singing to herself, ignoring Romy shaking her head.

‘You spoil that girl,’ she’d said, voice softening.

‘Ex-actly!’ declared Wilhelm with a glint his eye, and that was that.

Sophia had been buried more than thirty years ago, but the paint speckles reminded Romy of her giggles, which had filled the room. She cherished the spattered imperfections on the floorboards.

Romy braced herself against the preparation bench, overcome by loss and perhaps too much dust. She needed to open the window, let the fresh air blow these memories away before they suffocated her.

Romy would never forget the moment she had opened her front door with a smile—expecting to see Sophia, Joseph and Alexandra arriving for lunch to celebrate Sophia’s forty-first birthday—and found instead a pair of freshly minted police officers in crisp uniforms shifting uncomfortably on the doormat.

‘Mrs Cohen? Is your husband here too? I’m afraid we have some bad news.’

The scent of the chocolate cake baking in the oven filled the hall as they stepped inside.

Romy’s knees buckled and the young policewoman—a slip of a girl really—caught Romy by the shoulders in a surprisingly firm grip while her hapless partner blanched and stared at his shoes as he tried to compose himself. They’d shuffled inside and deposited Romy in the blue chair by the bay window while the young man went to find Wilhelm and make some weak tea with far too much sugar. Meanwhile, the young woman, who introduced herself as Constable Mary Fisher, held Romy’s hand as she explained that Sophia’s car had been knocked by a truck from behind into the path of an oncoming semitrailer. Sophia and Joseph were killed on impact, but their daughter was currently in surgery, doctors working to stem the bleeding from a nasty cut on her head.

Alexandra had been discharged from hospital into the care of her grandparents the following week and had lived with them ever since.

Wilhelm and Romy had experienced so much loss in their lives, but nothing had prepared them for the loss of Sophia. Her husband had always held his faith close, even in the Shanghai ghetto. The rituals brought him comfort. Wilhelm spent hours praying with the rabbi after Sophia’s accident, always holding out his hand for Romy to join them. But how could she?

Romy sniffed the musty air and looked at her hanging bunches of dried mugwort tied with brown string along the wall. She always harvested the new growth at the end of summer, plucking as many of the silky grey branches as she could store in her room. Some years ago she’d started making her own moxa sticks—shaped a little like cigars—to be lit and held to smoulder a few centimetres above a pressure point, heating cold or painful areas where qi had weakened or become stuck.

She didn’t take patients anymore, not since Wilhelm’s turn for the worse. His time was near and easing Wilhelm’s way to a painless death—and preparing Alexandra—occupied her every thought.

The room itself was only a few metres wide—more a corridor really—with windows down one side overlooking the garden. Patients always commented they felt calmer just sitting there. She had arranged the treatment bed to face the window so those having acupuncture would have something lovely to contemplate.

Along the opposite wall was a line of bookshelves filled with glass jars topped with airtight silver lids. Romy stood in front of her wall of jars, leaning in to read the labels.

She wanted to make a tang to soothe Alexandra’s cough and strengthen the qi in her lungs so she didn’t develop bronchitis. Her granddaughter had never been one for crying—more was the pity. The deep breaths and exhalations that accompanied a good weep often churned up all the negative energy and expelled it from the body. Alexandra tended to cling to her sadness, clench it deep inside where it couldn’t be touched.

Romy knew all too well what happened when grief and sadness lingered for too long.

She brushed her hair back and reached for her Compendium of Materia Medica wedged beside a mottled leather diary. She used both arms to hoist the hardback volume off the shelf and onto her benchtop, flipping open the pages smeared with ground star anise and pink flecks of tree peony bark. A crushed gardenia pod was stuck in the gutter between the pages. She ran her fingers over the black and white illustrations of ginseng, lotuses, lilies, peppermint and magnolias until she found the page she was looking for. If Alexandra were beside her, she’d ask why her grandmother hadn’t moved onto an online database with something stored in a cloud, but Romy couldn’t bear to part with her book.

She pulled some jars down onto her old wooden bench to make a Sang Ju Yin formula, weighing all the ingredients on her old silver scales before dropping them into a copper bowl. First, she added the dark green anti-inflammatory strands of dried mulberry leaf with a golden chrysanthemum flower to clear the wind and heat. Then she added some crushed bitter apricot kernels to calm the coughing plus a few dried roots of the magnificent blue balloon flower, mint, forsythia, reed rhizome and liquorice root.

She bent to sniff the dried herbs—the spicy notes of the liquorice, zing of the mint and sweet woodiness of the chrysanthemum—then placed the jars back on the shelf. She glanced at her watch, checking it wasn’t yet time to relieve Sally and Alexandra. She’d need to take the herbs into the kitchen and boil them in a terracotta pot for a few minutes until the mixture resembled a thin, bitter broth. The pungent smell would fill the kitchen.

Before she picked up her bowl, she flipped to the back of the compendium and slipped out a piece of bamboo scroll with perfect calligraphy running down the left-hand side. On the right was a series of botanical drawings, all annotated. The first was a chrysanthemum. It was so vivid, from the peach tips of the petals, the veins on the green leaves—including the holes where they had been nibbled by an insect—to the scraps of grass behind. She ran her fingers down the lines, translating as she went until she found notes and annotations for Sang Ju Yin. She held the bamboo parchment alongside the compendium’s recipe for comparison and made adjustments to the formula and ingredients.

Same trunk, different branch.

Romy gently circled the flower with her index finger, pressing the soft page to her cheek and enjoying the faintest whiff of mint—such a cooling herb—even after all these years. Then she turned to the back of the compendium once more and slid the sheet with the chrysanthemum under the pocket created by the back cover flap so it lay flat with the others. She didn’t dare leaf through the other illustrations and letters, nor glance at the red envelope that lay tucked away and hidden at the bottom.

These ancient pages were remnants of another life, another time. One day soon they would be passed to Alexandra.

With the scents and the delicate script came the memories she’d worked so hard to repress. Romy pushed the book back onto the shelf, switched off the light and hurried from her little clinic, locking the door behind her. As she passed through the Moon Gate Wilhelm had made, the faded timber turned silver in the last of the afternoon light.

Wilhelm—the man who gave her a new life. A family. Her heart swelled and plunged as she picked her way over the piles of red and yellowing leaves and a cool gust of wind caused yet more leaves to swirl down around her. Wilhelm…

Sweet, kind Wilhelm was about to leave Romy with her ghosts.