While it’s true that the engagement had been an arranged one when Xian and Ira were still in the nursery, in some ways, that had made their eventual separation and then this new encounter worse.
Not knowing anything about the world, Xian had grown up taking it for granted that Ira would be his wife one day. He’d never questioned it back then, and because he’d also liked Ira as a childhood playmate, he’d even looked forward to when they became adults and started their own family, thinking it would just be an extension of the days they’d spent playing together.
Xian was fourteen and Ira thirteen when the Lees uprooted themselves and moved to S Country. They were still little more than children back then, but old enough to know some things.
When she secretly visited Xian’s school to say
