When Romy awoke, she was lying on a lumpy mattress in a dim room. She tried to swallow, but her throat felt tight and raw.

‘Here, have some water,’ said a familiar voice beside her as a hand slid under her neck to support her head. A metal cup touched her lips.

‘Jian,’ she said.

The water soothed her throat, but almost immediately her stomach started to churn and she covered her mouth with her hand as she tasted bile.

Mutti, Papa. Shu. Wilhelm.

The tiny bird of a baby nestled in the crook of Wilhelm’s arm.

It hurt to remember.

‘Where am I?’ she asked.

‘You’re safe,’ Jian reassured her. ‘My men checked to make sure that no-one followed us. This is an apartment we keep for hiding people who need to disappear for a while.’ His arm was damp with sweat, traces of bitter gunpowder mingled with the sweeter allspice on his skin. She squeezed her eyes shut. The air was thick and steamy and each breath made her body ache.

‘Tea?’ he asked softly as she heard him pad to the corner of the room. ‘I just boiled some.’

He came back and sat on the edge of the bed as she struggled to sit up.

He passed her a chipped blue china cup. ‘Careful, it’s hot.’ He sipped his own tea from what looked like a glass jar.

‘What happened?’ Romy held her tea with both hands.

‘You fainted,’ he explained. ‘You collapsed in front of Shu’s body, but I caught you and laid you safely on the ground before I picked up Shu. I’m not sure how long I stood clutching her little broken body before Wu’s men stepped out of the shadows and started asking questions.’ He paused and his cheeks reddened. ‘I’d been sobbing so much I hadn’t noticed anyone approach.’ Jian paused.

‘The Japanese Kempeitai had been watching me for weeks—alongside two of Chang Wu’s men—thinking I would eventually lead them to Chang Wu’s missing baby. Li’s baby.’ Jian grimaced. ‘I didn’t know any of this—though I suspected. Why else wouldn’t they just kill me? Luckily they didn’t know you were the one at the villa that night helping Li, otherwise…’ He closed his eyes.

Romy’s skin felt numb, her body hollow. She no longer feared death. With so many loved ones gone, it seemed futile to contemplate a future.

He opened his eyes and held Romy’s gaze. ‘That’s why I haven’t been to see you.’

‘What happened next?’ Romy croaked.

‘Chang Wu’s men wanted to know who the baby I was holding belonged to. The nurse beside us was flustered—annoyed at being pulled away from treating the injured—and snapped at Wu’s men. The entire neighbourhood was swarming on the footpath. Screaming…tripping over bodies…falling in holes.

‘The hoodlums didn’t even notice you on the ground, lying among the debris and the fallen. The nurse pressed them into service, instructing them to find a rickshaw and take three howling children—one with blood streaming down his forehead—straight to Ward Road Hospital. I think they were too surprised to object.

‘The second they disappeared around the corner, I promised the nurse I’d take care of you and carried you away over my shoulder before anyone else came looking.’

Romy wiped her tears away with the sleeve of her shirt, too distraught to speak. She thought of her parents’ faces covered with soot and white plaster dust. Mutti’s red lips. The worn soles of Papa’s boots. The lines of broken, bloody bodies in the laneways.

‘I’m sorry about Marta and Oskar,’ Jian said softly. ‘They were fine people.’

Romy nodded as hot tears slid down her cheeks.

Jian took a sip of his tea. ‘Chang Wu had become fixated on Wilhelm—his connection to Li. My comrades told me he was furious. The diulian.’

‘Loss of face,’ said Romy, shaking her head.

Romy’s head thrummed because she had lost face too. She’d offered her heart to Wilhelm, and he’d chosen another. She closed her eyes and remembered the catch in Wilhelm’s breath as he’d pressed her against the bench in the bakery and she’d wrapped her legs around him, the quiver in his hands as he slid them up her skirt. The yearning in his eyes outside her lilong that icy Chinese New Year’s Eve.

Despite everything, she loved Wilhelm and wanted him to survive.

‘Where’s Wilhelm now?’ she asked.

‘Chungking.’ Nine hundred miles west of Shanghai, in the heart of China. ‘Probably on his way over the mountains to Calcutta. From there, we have military contacts that may be able to get him to Australia.’

Romy squeezed her eyes shut. How could she tell him she’d failed him? She’d lost his beloved daughter.

Jian’s voice softened, ‘You love him.’ It wasn’t a question. ‘You were prepared to sacrifice yourself for this man, for his baby. For Li…’ He sighed.

Romy touched her scalp. Her head was throbbing, or perhaps it was the sound of bombs falling nearby. The pounding in her ears was relentless.

‘Do you have a headache?’ he asked. ‘I put some camphor oil on it. And I have my needles.’ He reached beside the mattress and unrolled the leather pouch with his needles and the manuscript he was always working on at Dr Ho’s treatment rooms.

She reached out and ran her fingers over the script, admiring the fine calligraphy and accompanying ink sketches of cardamom buds, lotus roots and buds.

‘You kept it.’

‘It’s my blood, my story,’ he said, looking wistful. ‘It’s like Li’s pendant. These are the things that connect us to those who came before.’ He bit his lip. ‘I’ll never forgive myself for not saving Li. Why didn’t she tell me the baby was coming that night?’

‘She wanted to protect you. She always did.’ Romy thought back to the dreamy boy with a camera, prodding and poking cockleshells, being lectured about duty by his father. ‘That’s why she had you take her portrait, so you had enough money to survive.’

He sighed. ‘She tried to keep me as far away from Chang Wu as possible.’ Tears dampened his eyes.

‘She put all her energy into saving you, protecting Wilhelm and saving her baby.’

‘I didn’t do enough. I failed my duty.’

‘No,’ said Romy, looking Jian in the eyes. ‘That was her gift to you.’

They sat in heavy silence.

‘But you, Romy—’ he gently reached for her chin and tilted her head so he was looking directly into her eyes ‘—you always had enough.’ He tapped his chest. ‘You always had enough in here. You absorb the energy of others around you. Your mother, the patients at the hospital…You’re beautiful.’

Romy snorted. Men didn’t blink when she walked into a room.

His fingers stroked her cheek. ‘So much pain for you, Romy. I always watched you as a girl, sitting slightly to one side. You carried the weight of the world on your shoulders. You always have.’

And when she looked up she saw admiration in those dark eyes.

Jian blushed, and she remembered the bashful boy with the long eyelashes and rosy cheeks among the peach blossoms all those years ago.

She put her head on his broad shoulder, nestling into his neck as though her head had always fitted there. Her cheek rubbed against his sticky skin. Jian took the cup from her hand and placed it on the floor as they lay back on the thin mattress. She fell asleep to the rhythm of his chest rising and falling and thought, This is all I have left in the world.