Page 30 of Caution to the Wind

Some people are bornwith rebellion in their blood.

A genetic anomaly.

A quirk of fate.

However you want to classify it, some people just eat trouble for breakfast and spit out the backbone of societal conventions like they don’t know how to digest it.

I know because I was born one of them.

They named me Mei Zhen.

Beautiful pearl.

Something elegant and refined, cultivated under pressure.

When they quickly discovered I was nothing more than grit, they applied more pressure, hoping I’d slowly alchemize into something more precious.

Into something worthy of the name Marchand.

I never cared much about names or living up to them. And no matter how hard they tried, I never learned how to care about what people thought of me.

Why should perfect strangers have any impact on my life?

It wasn’t until I was older that I realized why people cared.

Why people followed the often-archaic rules society had laid out for them.

Because bad things happened when you didn’t toe the line.

I didn’t care about punishments. My parents tried everything: time-outs, spankings, technology bans, public shaming…nothing worked.

Not until Cleo.

The moment my dad figured out how much she meant to me, he used her as both a threat and a lure. If I wanted to see her, I had to help Ma roll six hundred dumplings for the small fundraiser they were throwing out of the house, get at least a ninety percent on my physics test, apply and get into the top universities in North America and make something of myself for the sake of the family.

It was weird how Dad’s and Ma’s ideas of family differed even though they both held family higher than anything else.

For Dad, who was from old money Quebec and had moved out west fresh out of university to make something of himself in the oil-rich Albertan economy, family meant obligation and loyalty to a shared family ideal. In his case, it meant keeping the Marchand reputation squeaky clean and classy. It meant filling the communal coffers and making friends with the right people to network. It meant adding another, higher rung to the social ladder his family had been building and climbing for decades.

For Ma and Old Dragon, it meant having dinner together at least once a week, even when we were busy. It meant sharing a mug of hot water and lemon every morning before we ate breakfast. It meant taking care of each other. With money, yes, and with honour, but also with tender loving care.

It meant doinganythingto protect your family.

That resonated with me early on.

It was the one and only lesson my parents had instilled in me the way they’d wanted to.

They just didn’t expect it to backfire on them.

For me to consider three outsiders without shared blood just as much my family as them.

“Your father loves you, you know?” Ma murmured sleepily over the low voices playing from the laptop I had set up on her tray table that played one of her favourite films.

I blinked at her, startled by the non sequitur.

She grabbed my hand, her skin soft as worn paper against my own. I could count the pale lavender and blue veins beneath the pale flesh, and the knobs of her finger bones were too pronounced. They’d stopped chemo weeks ago when it became obvious she wasn’t going to beat the disease. The medicine had made her sick, but the cancer in its final stages was eating her up from the inside out.

I raised her hand in mine to rub my cheek against the back of her hand.