I met Isabel at a party on a yacht that was thrown, coincidentally, by your cousin Eddie Cheng and his best friend Leo Ming. Eddie was one of the few people who actually took pity on me. I have to confess—I initially stayed far away from Isabel because she reminded me of you. Like you, she was constantly being underestimated because of her looks. Turns out she was an intensely smart lawyer, University of Birmingham Law School grad, and fast becoming one of Hong Kong’s top litigators. And she had a sense of style and breeding that set her apart. Her father was Jeremy Lai, the distinguished barrister. The Lais are an old-money family from Kowloon Tong, and her mother is from a rich Indonesian Chinese family. I did not want to fall for another unattainable princess who was chained to the rules of her family.

But then as I got to know her, I found that she was nothing like you. No offense, but she was your polar opposite—wild and uninhibited, completely carefree. I found it exhilarating. She didn’t give a damn what her family thought, and as it turns out, they thought the sun and moon orbited around her and she could do no wrong. And to top it off, her parents liked me. (I think it was partly because her last three boyfriends had been Scottish, Aussie, and African American, respectively, and they were just so relieved when she brought home a Chinese boy.) They welcomed me into the family even during the early days of our dating, and it was such a refreshing change to be accepted and even liked by my girlfriend’s family. After six months of our whirlwind romance, we got married, and you know the rest.

But actually, you don’t.

Everyone thinks that we got married so fast because I got her pregnant. Yes, she was pregnant, but it wasn’t with my child. The thing I initially loved about Isabel—her unpredictability—was also her curse. Three months after we started dating, she suddenly disappeared. Things had been going so well, I was actually beginning to heal from our breakup. Then one day Isabel was gone. Turns out she had met up with one of her Indonesian cousins for a drink at Florida (you remember that ghastly bar in Lan Kwai Fong), and he had another friend tagging along. Some Indonesian chap who was a model. Before her cousin even knew what was happening, Isabel had disappeared with the guy. After a few days, I found out they had gone to Maui and were holed up in some private villa having a torrid romance. She wouldn’t come back to Hong Kong, and she broke off contact with all of us. I couldn’t understand what was happening. I was distraught, as were her parents.

Then it came out that something like this had happened before. Not once, but several times. The year before, she had met this African American guy on a plane on the way to London, and suddenly she quit her job and moved to New Orleans with him. Two years before that, it was the Aussie surfer and a condo on the Gold Coast. I soon realized that the problem was bigger than any of us could have fathomed—my sister was studying psychopharmacology at the time, and she thought Isabel might have borderline personality disorder. I tried to talk to her parents about it, but they seemed to be in denial. They could not face up to the fact that their darling daughter might have any sort of mental illness—albeit one that can be managed with proper treatment. Through all her episodes, they never made her see a psychologist or get a proper evaluation. They just put up with her “dragon phases,” as they called it. She was born in the year of the dragon, and that was always the excuse they had for her behavior. They implored me to go to Hawaii and “rescue her.”

So I went. I flew to Maui, and it turns out the male model was long gone but Isabel was now living in some sort of commune with a bunch of Radical Faeries. And she was pregnant. Four months pregnant, no longer manic, but too embarrassed to come home. It was too late to have an abortion, she didn’t want to give up her child, but she couldn’t go back to Hong Kong like that. She told me no one ever loved her like I did, and she begged me to marry her. Her parents begged me to marry her quickly in Hawaii. And so I did. We had one of those “intimate weddings with only close family” at the Halekulani in Waikiki.

I want you to know that I went into this marriage with my eyes wide open. I saw the good in Isabel underneath her illness, and I desperately wanted to help her. When things were great, and when the full sunlight of her being shined on you, there was nothing like it. She was a magnetic, beautiful soul, and I was in love with that part of her. Or at least that’s what I told myself. I thought that if she had a stable husband by her side, a husband who could help her properly manage her mental health issues, everything would be okay.

But things were not okay. After Chloe was born, the hormones really messed with Isabel, and she struggled with horrendous postpartum depression. She started hating me and blaming me for all her problems, and we stopped sleeping together. (I mean in the same bedroom, because we hadn’t been physically intimate since before she took off for Maui.) She only wanted the baby in the bedroom with her. And the nanny. It was an unusual arrangement, to say the least.

One day she woke up and it was as if nothing had happened. I moved back into the bedroom, the nanny and Chloe went into their own room. Isabel was a loving wife for the first time in over a year. She went back to work, and we went back to being the social couple about town. I could focus a little more on my work again, and Wu Microsystems went through another terrific growth phase. Isabel became pregnant with Delphine, and I thought the worst was behind us.

Then suddenly, things turned on a dime again. This time it was less dramatic—there was no sudden whirlwind romance with a mysterious stranger, no fleeing to Istanbul or the Isle of Skye. Instead, Isabel’s new behavior turned out to be more insidious and destructive. She claimed she was having secret affairs with married men. Three of them at her law firm—as you can imagine it made for insane office politics. She was also involved with a high-profile judge, whose wife found out about the affair and threatened to go public with everything. I will spare you the rest of this story, but by this point, Isabel and I were for all intents and purposes living totally separate lives. I was at the flat in the Mid-Levels, and she was at the house on The Peak with our daughters.

When you came back into my life, I realized two things: First, that I never stopped loving you. You were my first love, and I have loved you since the day I met you at Fort Canning Church when we were fifteen. And second, I also realized that, unlike me, you had moved on. I saw how much you loved Michael, and how you wouldn’t give up on your marriage. I knew that I had been unfair to Isabel from the start—since I wasn’t truly over you, I had never given all of myself to her. But I was determined to change things. I was ready to let go of you at last, and that would be the key to saving my marriage, to saving Isabel. I wanted to be able to love her free and clear, and to love my daughters as much as you love Cassian.

And so I redoubled my efforts, and you became my de facto marriage counselor. All those e-mails we’ve exchanged over the past two years were a beacon in the night for me as I tried to rebuild my marriage. But as you can clearly see, nothing has worked. The mistakes are all mine. Isabel and I might finally be heading to the bottom of the ocean once and for all, but it has been a long time coming.

This is my rambling way of trying to explain to you that you should not feel a single ounce of regret about what happened between you and Isabel in Venice. And more important, I want you to know the real story, because I can no longer live with any dishonesty between us. I hope that you’ll be able to forgive me for not being truthful with you from the start. You are one of the few bright spots in my otherwise fucked-up life, and now more than ever, I count on our friendship.

With all my heart,

Charlie

Charlie sat in front of his computer, reading over his e-mail again and again. It was almost 7:00 p.m. in Hong Kong. It would be high noon in Venice. Astrid would probably be having lunch poolside at the Cipriani. He took a deep breath, and then he hit the delete button.

6

CARLTON AND COLETTE

SHANGHAI, CHINA

“You have broken my heart. And I don’t know how it will ever heal,” she said in a pained voice.

“I don’t understand why you are being like this,” Carlton groaned in Mandarin.

“You don’t understand? You don’t realize how much you have hurt me? How can you be so cruel?”

“Explain exactly how I am being cruel. Because I really don’t get it. I’m just trying to do the right thing.”

“You have betrayed me. You have taken his side. And by doing this you have destroyed me.”

“Oh Mother, don’t be so dramatic!” Carlton huffed into his phone.

“I took you to Hong Kong to protect you. Don’t you see that? And you did the worst thing ever—you defied me and went back to Shanghai to meet that girl! That bastard girl!”

Lying on his king-size bed in Shanghai, Carlton could practically feel the volcanic seething of his mother at the other end of the line in Hong Kong. He tried shifting to a calmer tone. “Her name is Rachel, and you are really overreacting. I actually think you’d like her a lot. And I’m not just saying that. She’s intelligent—far more intelligent than me—but she doesn’t put on any airs. She’s one hundred percent authentic.”

Shaoyen snorted in derision. “You stupid, stupid boy. How did I ever raise a son who is that stupid? Don’t you see that the more you accept her, the more you stand to lose?”