Archive of Our Own

At the mahjong table, Rachel says, “I wanted you to know that one day, when he marries another lucky girl who is enough for you, and you’re playing with your grandkids while the Tan Huas are blooming, and the birds are chirping, that it was because of me. A poor, raised by a single mother, low-class, immigrant nobody.”

Eleanor’s mind is still stuck on that loop. Rachel Chu lost to her on purpose. Rachel is not who Eleanor thought she was.

And Rachel leaves the mahjong parlour, meeting up with a woman who has to be her mother, who glares at Eleanor as they go, hand tight on Rachel’s arm.

Eleanor gets back into her town car, and goes back home.

Later, she hears that Rachel has left Singapore too. Nick is quiet, and reserved, and doesn’t want to talk about it. Eleanor can’t tell if it’s true or not, what Rachel said, that he’s resenting her. But he doesn’t chase after Rachel, doesn’t leave Singapore. He does get his own apartment in the city, which causes a minor scandal, because no matter how much money they have it’s a waste, him living on his own when he’s not married, and how could he do this to his parents, to Ama? Eleanor bears the criticism. It’s better than the alternative. And Nick may be living alone, but at least he comes back to the family business.

Eleanor starts investigating Rachel anyway.

She pays the same New York private investigator she had look into Rachel’s mother, and he keeps Eleanor updated. She pours through the reports, looking for any hint that Rachel might be thinking of coming back.

There’s nothing. It’s done. Eleanor has her son back on the right path, for the most part. He’s doing the right thing for his family. It should be over.

There was something about Rachel in the mahjong parlour though, that Eleanor can’t stop thinking about. It’s the first time she really saw Rachel for what she was, which was more like Eleanor than Eleanor would have ever guessed, and also, somehow, completely unknowable. Eleanor was so sure she knew what kind of person Rachel was, and she hates how that one moment has called everything into question, how she can’t keep herself from turning her memories of that week over and over again in her mind.

Months pass. Nick is working with his father, and, in New York, Rachel is still teaching, still having regular dinners with her mother, still hasn’t contacted Nick, as far as Eleanor and the private investigator can tell.

Then the investigator calls Eleanor on her personal line. It’s unthinkable—all of their communications have been through secure email so far. Eleanor has to make excuses, leave the room and find somewhere more secure before she can call him back, so tense she feels like she might snap in half.

“Rachel Chu is dating a woman,” the investigator says, rushed like calling her was the first thing he did after finding out. Eleanor pushes him for details—what did he see, when did he see it, where were they, how long has this been going on? She tells him to keep on it and hangs up the phone, lets her arm fall loosely back to her side.

She should be thinking about how glad she is—this could have ruined her family. But there’s this horrible twinge of familiarity in her gut, this chasm of grief that really, she and Rachel are more similar than she thought they were. That maybe tearing Rachel down was just one more way of destroying herself.

Rachel and her girlfriend break up two months later. Eleanor tries to put the whole thing out of her mind. It’s been long enough now that Rachel isn’t coming back—or at least, it’s been long enough that it’s easier to tell herself that. She stops paying the private investigator. She gets back to her life.

And then Rachel comes back to Singapore.

*

Rachel has kept in better touch with Peik Lin after her break-up with Nick than she has since that first year after college. It wasn’t really that they’d drifted apart before, just that long distance was hard for some friendships, and they’d both gotten busy. Life happened. After the break-up though, Peik Lin was the only person who was there who Rachel could talk to about it, and then it was just nice to be in contact again.

And then, a few months into this, Peik Lin called her while Rachel was in the middle of office hours, and said, “Okay I have something to tell you are you ready?”

Rachel scrambled to lock the office door, certain that whatever Peik Lin wanted to tell her she didn’t want her students to overhear, and then when Peik Lin said, “Astrid and I are dating!” she leaned against the door for support.

“What? …Nick’s cousin Astrid?”

“Do we know another Astrid?” Peik Lin asked. “Yes, Nick’s cousin Astrid! And I hope this isn’t weird for you, because I’m really excited and I want to tell you about our date.”

The thought of it was both absurd and delightful—she had trouble even picturing Peik Lin and Astrid having a conversation with each other, let alone dating. The thought of two people she liked dating each other made her smile anyway as she checked through the peep hole every once in a while to make sure there weren’t any students outside waiting to talk to her while she was listening to Peik Lin talk.

Apparently Peik Lin and Astrid ran into each other again at that market Nick took Rachel to, on her first night in Singapore, and having met at the Young family function last year was enough for them to start talking.

Rachel still isn’t sure how this turned into dating, but they’re still dating the next time Rachel talks to Peik Lin, and the time after that, and she seems happy. Astrid is around for some of these later calls, and she seems happy too.

It’s almost exactly a year after the last time Rachel was in Singapore that Peik Lin asks her to come visit again for a week, and while visiting both of them sounds fantastic, it takes her breath away at first, how much the thought of going back there still hurts. She’s dated other people since Nick, she’s spent a long time going over in her mind what a dick move it was, for Nick not to tell her about his family, especially given what happened, but—a year is the entire length of time they were together. Shouldn’t that be the maximum amount of time it takes for her to be over it?

He proposed to her, though. She had wanted to say yes. Maybe that kind of thing takes a little more time.

She feels bad, that the deciding factor in her agreeing to go is Peik Lin promising her that (according to Astrid) Nick is out of the country, but it is what it is. He hasn’t even texted her, since she rejected his proposal, which she gets, but they were friends first. She was still in love with him when she broke up with him, and not being able to be friends again is probably the only thing that could have made that heartache even worse.

But even though she’s still a little heartbroken, she’s not in love with him now, just aching with the remains of it, and she does want to go back. It’s just to see Peik Lin and Astrid, anyway.

So of course, the first day Rachel is there, Peik Lin throws a dress in her face and tells her:

“Put this on, you’re coming to a party with us! We’ll just be there for like an hour, I promise, Astrid just has to show her face.”

It takes a minute for it to sink in. “This is a family party isn’t it? There is absolutely no way! I’m the American who broke Nick’s heart, I can’t just… show up.”

“You can wait in the car if you like,” Astrid says, giving her this sad, gentle smile. “But I do have to make an appearance I’m sorry to say. It won’t take long.”

Rachel’s always had trouble saying no to a pretty girl, and it’s worse when it’s Astrid, who is one of the nicest people Rachel has ever met.

What she’s gotten, from talking to Peik Lin over the phone, is that the family hasn’t even acknowledged that they’re dating, except for a couple of the younger cousins. Astrid is still getting asked by aunties and a few uncles about when she’s going to get a boyfriend, getting told she needs a husband to raise her son, and they know a nice young man they could introduce her to, all of this while Peik Lin is standing next to her or in earshot. Peik Lin has mentioned getting asked invasive questions about her family a few times, but has been mostly quiet on the subject. Rachel has been in at least a similar position, though. She knows it’s… uncomfortable.

Rachel did want to see Ollie again, anyway. She tells Peik Lin she owes her, and puts on the dress.

“Damn Rachel,” Peik Lin says, and makes her turn again, and when Rachel catches sight of herself in the mirror, she does look good. Maybe she does want to show off a little.

*

Everything goes fine at first—other than all of the looks, all of the snide little smiles, hidden behind perfectly manicured fingernails. But that’s the sort of thing Rachel was expecting, at least. It’s just an hour or so, and it’s for Peik Lin and Astrid… and then Rachel runs into Eleanor Young on her way back from the bathroom.

Eleanor is stunning as ever, in this shimmering gold dress, and of course Rachel would run into her on her own, after she’s been so careful to stick close to Peik Lin and Astrid since arriving. She had forgotten, somehow, in the year since it happened, how off-balance Eleanor had made her feel, how small, before she had gathered herself and stood up. And Eleanor has no power over her anymore, if she ever did—other than that this is her house and she could probably kick Rachel out if she wanted. Rachel needs to stand up now.

“Eleanor,” she says, tries to sound polite yet formal, and Eleanor is watching her with this unreadable look on her face, not saying anything, and Rachel falters, off-balance again. If Eleanor wants to ignore her she can deal with that, if Eleanor wants to snipe at her she can snipe back, but this staring? She has no idea what to do with that. She’s about to walk away and just get back to the party when Eleanor grabs her arm and drags her down the hallway.

“Hey!” Rachel snaps. “What are you doing?”

Of course, the dark traitorous part of Rachel’s mind is completely into this even as she’s trying to break Eleanor’s grip on her arm. Even though she thinks Eleanor is actually trying to drag her off to lay into her about Nick again, even though this woman is the reason Rachel broke up with Nick in the first place, there’s nothing like scary hot women pulling her around.

Eleanor pulls her into a room, and shuts the door and Rachel crosses her arms, tries to pretend like she’s still in control of this situation even though she has no idea what’s going on. “Look,” she says. “I haven’t even seen Nick in a year. I’m here with Astrid and Peik Lin.”

Eleanor steps closer to her, and Rachel steps back, and then she’s against the door, and Eleanor’s eyes flicker down across her face. When she presses her lips to Rachel’s, so softly Rachel doesn’t even quite realize what’s happening at first, it takes her a minute to catch up.

This is Nick’s mother, but it’s still, embarrassingly, kind of a fantasy for Rachel, a brief lived and inappropriate crush she was trying not to think about (also because Eleanor is married?), but—this is actually happening, in real life. Eleanor Young draws back from kissing her, stern as ever, but there’s this kind of strange look on her face too, and her hand is shaking just a little, where it was grasping Rachel’s face, and Rachel reaches forward this time. Touches the soft skin of Eleanor’s jaw with one hand, and reaches around her neck, and pulls her in, and she tastes like champagne and one of the appetizers from downstairs.

The fantasy, really, was Eleanor taking charge, but she doesn’t, it’s just kissing, and… whatever, Rachel is into this either way. Eleanor Young is kissing her, nails digging into Rachel’s neck, and Rachel is probably never going to see her again.

She might as well walk them forward to the bed—half-expecting Eleanor to bite her head off, still sort of surprised when she doesn’t. Might as well push Eleanor down when her knees hit the back of the bed, might as well climb on top of her—pretty dress, and soft skin, and Rachel’s hand is caressing the outside of Eleanor’s breast, and Eleanor hisses into her mouth, tugs sharply on her hair, and god, Rachel hasn’t felt this way since… don’t think about it.

She doesn’t think about Nick.

She thinks about reaching through the dress, running the pad of her thumb over Eleanor’s nipple, the way Eleanor gasps into her mouth, tries to push her other hand down.

She thinks about moving down the bed, pulling Eleanor’s dress up. And her head is between Eleanor’s legs, and there are tight fingers clenching in her hair, and it feels so good, that edge of pain. And Eleanor barely makes any noise—all Rachel can hear is her quiet gasping, the music and conversation of the party filtering through, and all she can think about, even though she’s trying not to, is how Eleanor had been so sure Rachel wouldn’t amount to anything, the last time they met, how she wants to punish her for that, how she still wants to prove her wrong.

Making Eleanor shudder and writhe underneath her is sort of like that and sort of not at all. It’s nothing like hooking up with a couple of girls in college after parties either, even though that’s the context Rachel knows she’s drawing from.

After, when Eleanor is catching her breath, Rachel watches her, waits for her to get up, to try to touch her back, because she’s burning with it, and Eleanor just… doesn’t.

Rachel gets back on the bed and kisses her again, and Eleanor kisses back. And it’s good, this gentle kissing, but gentle isn’t what this is, what Rachel wants from this. Fucking her ex-boyfriend’s mother in his family home is a life decision she’s made, and fucking is definitely what she wants it to be. Anything else will make her think too much about what the hell she’s doing.

Rachel tries to move Eleanor’s hands to touch her breasts, and Eleanor moves away like she’s been scalded.

“What do you think you’re doing?” the words are quiet and sharp, and totally at odds with this entire situation.

“What?” Rachel asks, and they’re just staring at each other for a minute. Rachel has no idea what this is. “I’m sorry, were you not into me going down on you ten minutes ago? Are you not planning to return the favour?”

“This was not a favour,” Eleanor says, like she’s not lying back beneath Rachel on this bed, looking totally fucking ruined, and Rachel just cannot.

“Are you kidding me right now? You’re the one who grabbed me! Was this just a fucking power play for you, get me to get you off and then…”

“Are you finished?” Eleanor asks, cold, and Rachel can’t think of a single thing to say.

Eleanor readjusts her dress, which she never even took off, and leaves the room, and Rachel’s just frozen because what do you do with that?

Eleanor doesn’t come back. Rachel’s not sure if she expected her to or not. Eventually, she fixes up her makeup in the en suite (of course every room in this house has one), and goes back out to the party.

Astrid asks where she was, says she was getting worried—she’d seen Eleanor earlier looking like she was on the war path.

Rachel doesn’t know what to say. She feels small, and humiliated, and still annoyingly turned on.

She doesn’t see Eleanor again before they leave the party—Peik Lin and Astrid’s original plan had been to take Rachel to dinner, and they even make the reservation on time.

It only hits her later, sleeping in Peik Lin’s room in her house (Peik Lin is staying at Astrid’s, which Rachel gets the impression she’s provided a good excuse for):

Eleanor was the one who grabbed Rachel. And now that she’s thinking more about it, if Eleanor did want to humiliate Rachel in some new way, she would have needed a public setting. And probably to have not been as… involved as she was either. Given what she knows about Eleanor, what the woman herself told Rachel last time she was in Singapore (with Nick, don’t think about it), Rachel wonders if she’s ever actually had sex with a woman before. And she knows how proud Eleanor is. Maybe the reason she pushed Rachel away was because she didn’t know what to do.

*

Rachel wants to talk to someone about this, thought about telling Astrid and Peik Lin last night after the party, even, but what could she say? Astrid has been a little more closed off about it, but Rachel has heard all about the Young family’s reaction to Astrid and Peik Lin in the months before she came back to Singapore. A lot of it has been disparaging remarks from Eleanor specifically: that the Methodist church of Singapore “recognizes homosexuality as incompatible with Christian teachings” was something Peik Lin told her, about a month ago, was a direct quote. Even last night, Eddie was talking about them and laughing just out of ear shot, and Rachel watched Astrid clutch her wine glass tighter, Peik Lin’s face go blank as she deliberately turned away. Oliver is clearly gay, but maybe it’s easier for the family to ignore because he doesn’t have a partner, or because he’s not part of the main line.

Given that Rachel had her tongue down Eleanor’s throat last night, she thinks Eleanor’s disapproval might be an internalized homophobia thing on her part, and maybe a product of how she was raised, but that doesn’t make it okay.

So she doesn’t want to tell Peik Lin or Astrid, and she’s not sure she should tell Oliver, because she’s not sure Eleanor wouldn’t go after him for knowing, and she obviously doesn’t want to tell Nick (or him to know anything about this at all, or even to see him again, probably).

She has breakfast with Peik Lin’s crazy family in the morning, and meets Peik Lin and Cassian for lunch the next day, and everything is going fine, and Peik Lin is really adorably good with Astrid’s kid, so Rachel gets distracted. But then Cassian gets chatting with one of the servers, who has some colouring stuff at another table in the restaurant, and Rachel blurts out,

“I slept with Eleanor at the party last night.”

Peik Lin stares. “Excuse me, SAY WHAT?”

“Shhh!” Rachel hisses, looking around the restaurant, face burning. “Everyone is looking now.”

“You need to explain this!” Peik Lin says again, and it’s quieter this time but it’s still whisper shouting—not exactly subtle.

“Not here,” Rachel tells her, still trying to stop blushing.

They hustle out of the restaurant, and take Cassian to the fanciest day care Rachel has ever seen (and it’s adorable, that Peik Lin is already on their list, and Rachel makes her blush by bugging her about it), and then Peik Lin makes her spill—even though there’s not much to spill.
Eleanor dragged her off and kissed her, they had sex, Eleanor left, Rachel left the party. Peik Lin doesn’t really have any advice for her either, because there isn’t exactly a script for accidentally banging your ex-boyfriend’s crazy rich, crazy hot, crazy mean mom.

Peik Lin does tell Astrid about it though, and the next time they all meet up Rachel thinks Astrid is sad about it, about all of it, but understands in a way that’s sort of awful when Rachel thinks about it. She shouldn’t understand why someone has treated her that way, why Eleanor is still someone Rachel wants to see again.

Because some soft making out and going down on Eleanor in the Young family house during a huge fucking party was kind of the best experience Rachel has had since she broke up with Nick (don’t think about it) and even though it’s an absolutely terrible idea for so many reasons—this is the woman who broke up her last serious relationship, this is the mother of her last serious boyfriend, this is the epitome of all of the family issues that meant her and Nick weren’t going to work out—Rachel kind of wants to do it again. She’s only got a week left in Singapore, and she’s half-convinced this is going to seem like some weird fever dream as soon as she gets home. She can freak out about it then.

If Eleanor actually doesn’t know what to do, maybe Rachel’s going to have to show her.

*

Astrid helps Rachel track Eleanor down the next day—or, she happens to know where Eleanor will be at least. Rachel ends up in probably the fanciest restaurant she’s ever seen, eating small plates of fancy food that are being paid for with Peik Lin’s credit card, staring Eleanor down across the room where she’s eating lunch with a bunch of women who possibly have bibles with them.

She waits until she’s sure Eleanor has seen her, is looking when she gets up to go to the bathroom, and as she goes she can see Eleanor following in the mirrors on the walls. She catches up with Rachel at the end of the hallway and drags her into the fancy single-occupancy washroom, kisses her again.

It’s less soft this time. Rachel has a strategy, and it’s basically making Eleanor angry enough that she almost forgets she doesn’t know how to touch a woman, or want to touch Rachel, or whatever the problem is. She couches instructions as barbs, “you know women like it when you touch their nipples, not just the ‘tender curve of their breast’ like in some romance novel, right?”

Eleanor doesn’t touch with her hands, because that would probably be giving in. She yanks up Rachel’s shirt, and pulls her bra aside and uses her mouth to bite her instead, so this was probably the best or worst idea Rachel has ever had. Eleanor doesn’t touch her below the waist, but she keeps biting, and pulls her hair again, and god, Rachel comes just from that, and then reaches for the button on Eleanor’s slacks.

After, Eleanor fixes her lipstick in the mirror, and doesn’t look at Rachel.

“Next time, call me first,” she says, and leaves without another word.

Rachel, still dazed, doesn’t think to tell her she doesn’t have her number. Eleanor wants Rachel to call her again. Rachel isn’t really sure if she wants to or not.

She gets the number from Astrid later.

Rachel meets up with Eleanor another two times in a hotel room, and it’s good and terrible all at once. Knowing that Eleanor likes women, likes Rachel, doesn’t make her a nice person, it doesn’t make any of what she’s done in the past forgivable, but it means Rachel understands, and the fact that she cares enough to understand is kind of terrible in and of itself.

*

Eleanor doesn’t know what possesses her, dragging Rachel off at the party. At first she thinks she’s going to berate her for daring to come back here, a year later, just after Nick seems to be getting back to his life, but when she shuts the door to the room, when Rachel is telling her she’s not here because of Nick, and Eleanor actually believes her, when Eleanor is just staring at her, she…

She doesn’t know what makes her kiss Rachel. Other than that maybe it’s because this is the third party in a row Phillip has missed on business and she hasn’t been able to stop thinking about Rachel for a year, and she just wants to see what it’s like, kissing a woman, just once. Rachel isn’t of her world, here—even if she told anyone, no one would believe her.

And then Rachel kisses back, and is pushing her onto the bed, and Eleanor has never felt like this before, like every part of her is waking up, is igniting. Rachel wants this too. It’s a terrible idea, doing this, doing this while she’s married, doing this in her house, doing this with her son’s ex-girlfriend, but it’s not just her, making this decision. It’s Rachel who touches her breasts, and Rachel between her legs, and Rachel making her come harder than she ever has in her life, for the first time in years.

It takes her a minute to compose herself—staring at the ceiling, eyes burning a little. She shouldn’t have done this. And Rachel is kissing her again, and it’s good, until it’s not, and then she leaves.

It was worse, she thinks, to have done it once. Even though she wanted to, even though it had been a thought squirming in the back of her mind for months now (years before that), now that she knows what it’s like, being with a woman, being with someone focused on her enjoyment, she knows the lack of it will feel more like a loss.

But two days later, when she’s having lunch with her bible study group, Rachel is across the room, watching her. And when she follows her to the bathroom, it’s Eleanor who makes Rachel fall apart under her hands and her mouth, without even having to fumble through not knowing how to touch a woman other than herself properly, and it’s a heady power. When Rachel makes her come again too, hands clenching Rachel’s shoulders to hold herself up, closing her eyes so she doesn’t have to watch them in the mirror, Eleanor knows that this is something she wants to try to keep.

It’s after their second time in a hotel room, when Rachel is pulling her dress back on, that she tells Eleanor she’s leaving for New York in the morning. She doesn’t say much else, and Eleanor isn’t sure what else there is to say.

They’ve gotten together to have sex four times now, and Eleanor gets to live with the fact that she drove away the woman her son loved and then carried on an affair with her for a week. And maybe it’s not as big a problem as all that. Rachel dated that woman, months ago, and Nick has dated in the past year too. It’s not as if he’s ever going to find out, and it’s not as if Eleanor is ever going to see Rachel again either, unless she comes back to visit Astrid again.

Still, when Rachel give Eleanor an awkward wave, shuts the door behind her the last time, when Eleanor is contemplating how much effort she’s going to have to put in to forget about this and get back to her old life, she realizes: maybe she doesn’t need to after all.

*

Eventually Rachel has to go back to New York. She thinks that will be it when she leaves, hugging Astrid and Peik Lin and Cassian goodbye, buying a new paperback at the cheaper airport gift store to get her through a coach flight back to New York. Some weird, hot, vacation fling—that’s the easiest way to think about it.

But Eleanor is still crazy rich, and somehow, it makes perfect sense for Rachel to get home one day to find her just waiting outside her apartment door, somehow in the building, somehow looking at Rachel like Rachel is the weird one here, for making her wait.

“Your class let out an hour ago,” Eleanor says, and Rachel just stares at her.

“What are you doing here?” she asks, but it’s not like she’s unwelcome, it’s just… weird. So Rachel opens the door and lets her inside, and Eleanor walks over to the couch, drops her purse like she belongs in Rachel’s space.

“I had business in New York,” Eleanor says.

“Am I the business?” Rachel asks when nothing else seems forthcoming, and Eleanor hesitates, for the first time looks a little uncomfortable. “I mean that’s fine if I am, I’m just curious. I don’t think you can write this off on your taxes.”

“You are a foreign investment,” Eleanor says, recovering with a hint of a smile, and Rachel lets out an honest laugh.

“I assume you’re here to have sex, but would you like to stay for dinner first?”

Eleanor would. It’s surprisingly not as awkward as Rachel thought it would be. She asks Eleanor about the trip, and Eleanor tells her about the business she actually is getting done while she’s here, and when they’re done eating Rachel reaches out to touch Eleanor’s face and draw her in for a kiss.

*

It’s not a relationship, even though Rachel doesn’t have any other relationships at the time. But once or twice a month, Eleanor will be there, and they will spend a day or two together. Sometimes the sex is angry, and sometimes it’s tender, and they don’t really talk about anything real.

Not at first, at least.

But Eleanor starts ordering her fancy shampoo to Rachel’s apartment, and expensive sheets and towels, because she “has standards,” as she tells Rachel. Which is sort of hilarious, given who she’s sleeping with, given what Eleanor made sure Rachel knew she thought of her last year. But that probably says just as much about Rachel’s standards too. Rachel gets sort of exasperated by all of the stuff showing up at her apartment, because it’s a lot, but she puts up with it anyway. She ignores the ribbing from her friends from work about her newfound expensive taste.

After one memorable visit involving Eleanor having to hide in Rachel’s closet for half an hour before Rachel can get her mother to leave, Rachel gets Eleanor agree to texting at least when she is physically in Rachel’s apartment, or when she’s on a plane, even if she won’t let Rachel know she’s coming before that.

Rachel tells Eleanor about her job sometimes in the way where she sort of knows Eleanor won’t care but wants to shove her face a little in how the other half lives (and also show her that Rachel’s work has value, like she couldn’t believe when Rachel was dating Nick). Sometimes, sometimes, Eleanor will reveal things about her life. Her mother was wearing red, when she first met her father. Her grandmother was the one who taught her mahjong. Rachel can’t tell if these pieces of information are accidents or not, and really, taken together, they still don’t paint much of a picture. There’s no one she can ask about Eleanor either, no one who knows about their relationship other than Peik Lin, who is happy to speculate, and Astrid, who is as happy for Rachel as she can be but gets this sad look on her face when the subject actually comes up.

*

It goes on for a while. Months, and then almost a year. And Rachel thinks it was just the familiarity that came with time that made her push a little more, tell Eleanor she had to try this Malaysian place a few blocks from Rachel’s apartment, instead of eating in. And Eleanor, severe, proper Eleanor got a drop of sauce on her face, and Rachel didn’t even kiss it off, she knew better. She just reached out with her thumb, with a familiarity that came from eating incredibly expensive takeout together all the time at her place, and brushed it off.

There was a private investigator. There had been one for some time. Eleanor rarely travelled on business, before this past year, and it had been a niggling suspicion in the back of her husband’s mind. A matter of course to look into it. With that much money it’s just what they did. It wasn’t the private investigator that was the problem though, it was a visiting distant cousin of the Youngs who was in the restaurant, was amazed to see Eleanor there, who caught a picture.

Which would have been fine if that cousin hadn’t followed them to the bathroom and got another picture of Rachel kissing Eleanor’s neck, Eleanor’s head tipped back in pleasure.

And in the same way the pictures of Rachel and Nick had, that picture went everywhere.

It’s not at all where Rachel thought this was going. She thought it would end in Eleanor coming to her senses, in her putting Rachel even more firmly in her “place”, cutting even more deeply with how much she knew about Rachel now. What she didn’t expect was for Eleanor to lose, and to someone who wasn’t even Rachel.

A lesbian affair would have been fine, Astrid explains later—the family has a reputation to uphold, they would have covered it up. Eleanor Young having a lesbian affair in the tabloids, with the woman her son was very publicly dating, is not salvageable. Eleanor’s husband, who Rachel had completely forgotten about, files for divorce.

*

By the time Rachel has realized what’s happened, Eleanor is already back in Singapore and already in disgrace. Astrid has put her up in one of her seventeen apartment buildings, even though Eleanor is barely deigning to acknowledge her. Peik Lin, Oliver and Nick have been calling all night. And before he was her boyfriend, the man she thought she might one day marry, Nick was her friend. And she’s been… seeing his mom. Rachel thinks she owes him an explanation, at least. She calls.

It’s an awkward conversation.

Nick is confused, hurt, wants to know when it started, what they’ve been doing—he doesn’t want to know what they’ve been doing, please don’t tell him.

Eventually, he says, “is she happy? Once I got older, I never really thought she was happy, with my father.”

Rachel knows that Eleanor would sneer at Nick asking that question—an American value, caring about one’s own happiness over the good of one’s family. “I don’t know,” is all she can tell him.

The next phone call she has to make is to her mother—the affair has made the international gossip section and Rachel expects this will reach her sooner rather than later—and that’s a conversation Rachel doesn’t want to revisit, even though her mother is supportive as ever, mostly just confused.

“She hurt you badly,” she tells Rachel. “When you went to Singapore with Nick. I’ve never seen you like that.” It’s true. It’s all true and Rachel doesn’t have a response to it. Eleanor is calculated and sometimes cruel, and Rachel knowing why that is shouldn’t make a difference. It shouldn’t.

But Eleanor can be soft and fragile too, and… mostly, Rachel wants to make sure she’s okay. Astrid flies Rachel to Singapore (seriously, not on Rachel’s salary, not even if she was flying economy), and lets her into the building where Eleanor is staying. When Rachel knocks on the door, Eleanor is wearing yesterday’s makeup when she opens it. She’s barefoot, her hair is mussed (not from Rachel, for once)—she looks like she’s either going to tear Rachel a new one or burst into tears. Characteristically, she does neither.

“Now is not a good time,” Eleanor tells Rachel. “You should go home.”

It’s been two days, now. Rachel has talked to Astrid, and Peik Lin, and Oliver. She knows what the situation is. She knows there’s no recovery from this—not for Eleanor. Her work, for most of her life, had been taking care of her family. Oliver told Rachel Eleanor didn’t want to shame them by going to court, so she’s agreed to a settlement, is letting her husband take the lion’s share of their joint account and assets.

And Rachel knows this will lead to Eleanor trying to bite her head off instead of maybe letting her in and letting her comfort her, but she has to ask, anyway. “Will you come back to New York with me?”

“My place is with my family,” Eleanor tells Rachel. “Your place is with your passion.” She doesn’t even sneer the last word, it’s totally flat, and Rachel thinks it’s sort of funny, in a terrible way, that Eleanor hasn’t realized by now she’s sort of a passion of Rachel’s too.

Before she can respond the door is shut gently in her face, and Rachel stands there for a while before giving up and heading over to the nearby building where Astrid actually lives. She spends two days hanging out with her and her kid and Peik Lin, and Peik Lin doesn’t even rib Rachel about not spending her whole visit “getting some,” and Eleanor doesn’t call her.

Rachel goes back to New York. Eleanor stays in Singapore.

Life goes on.

*

Life gets progressively more difficult for Astrid. It was one thing, having a single gay man in the family that everyone could just pretend “wasn’t interested in dating.” It was another having a lesbian start dating a “barely nouveau riche commoner” after divorcing her husband (no matter that Michael is the one who had the affair, no matter that Astrid is pansexual). Eleanor Young having an affair with a woman is different—especially given the woman’s identity—and it’s very different having all three things in one family at once.

Astrid holds her head up high, and carries on, and tries not to think about Peik Lin and how she keeps getting harassed by paparazzi on the street, about how good she is with Cassian, and how she remembers all of the characters in his favourite television show when Michael could never remember the show’s name.

About Eleanor, who she’s seen twice, who hasn’t left the apartment Astrid put her up in except to attend the divorce proceedings, stiff and wearing sunglasses the whole time.

About Rachel in New York, removed from it all by virtue of her location but still the subject of gossip magazines all over the country, still worrying about all of them.

Astrid bears it, and bears it, until one day Cassian comes home from his private pre-school, asking what a lesbian is, and why people keep saying mean things about Mommy and Peik Lin and Auntie Eleanor. And it’s one little thing that puts all of the rest of the little things into focus, the strain in Peik Lin’s smiles, how Astrid is having a harder and harder time falling asleep, how every time she sees Oliver he looks a little more withdrawn than the last. And this is her son.

Astrid asks Cassian if he would be alright with Peik Lin living with them—an enthusiastic yes. She buys an apartment building in Manhattan and asks Peik Lin to move in with them there. Then she takes a car to her other building and knocks on Eleanor’s door, and when Eleanor opens it, perfectly composed, arch as ever, Astrid tells her that she and Cassian and Peik Lin are leaving Singapore.

“Not forever,” she says. “Just for a while. I don’t want my son to grow up like this.”

“It will make him stronger,” Eleanor says. “He should learn to weather storms.”

Astrid looks at Eleanor and sees a woman who has made hard choices for the good of her family, who has sacrificed so much of her own life for it. Who, on the occasion of her finally doing something for herself, has lost it all.

“No,” Astrid says. “He should learn I will protect him from them.” She takes a breath. She didn’t come here to fight—they’ve done enough of that. “I’ve acquired a new property. We’re moving to New York. You’re welcome to accompany us—now or whenever you’d like. The apartment you’re staying in is yours, and you will have one in my new building as well.”

“Thank you,” Eleanor says, wearing what Astrid knows is a fake smile. “If you’ll excuse me, I have business to attend to.”

It’s a defence mechanism Astrid is used to seeing. Don’t engage with what makes you uncomfortable, like how her own parents completely ignored her sexuality when she came out to them on her first summer home from boarding school. She knows it means Eleanor doesn’t want to think about this now, or doesn’t want to anger Astrid, who is currently her financial benefactor.

She doesn’t know what Eleanor will decide to do though.

When she gets home, to where Peik Lin is now waiting with Cassian, she calls Rachel and tells her the three of them will be there next week. Rachel doesn’t ask about Eleanor, not directly, and Astrid doesn’t know what to offer.

*

New York is not Singapore. Ex-pats and visitors and people of a certain social standing know who the Youngs are, but the average person on the street does not. Astrid gets Cassian into another elite school with only the effort of a sizeable donation to their arts program, and Peik Lin shows her around her favourite spots in the city, accompanied by Rachel when she’s not working. Their presence goes largely unmarked.

It’s freeing. And Astrid has been all over the world for business, is used to the feeling of walking down the street unknown in different cities, but she’s never travelled with a woman she was seeing before.

LGBT+ rights have come a long way in Singapore, particularly in terms of public opinion. And it’s home, too. Astrid has family obligations she won’t abandon, regardless of what else comes with them these days, so she’s not sure how long she’s going to stay here. But for all its problems, in America, she and Peik Lin could get married, despite what their families might think about it. In New York, at least, Astrid can walk down the street holding Peik Lin’s hand and not get any strange looks for it, and it’s a weight off she didn’t realize she was carrying. She thinks she could be happy here.

*

Eleanor, in the apartment, has no dumplings to make, no mother in law to disapprove of her, no son to raise, no bible study groups to lead, no husband to talk with, infrequent though that was. She has some money of her own—enough to make sure she’ll be comfortable for a while, but only because her niece has given her an apartment, when Eleanor used to be able to buy hotels at the drop of a hat. Nick has tried to see her weekly, of course, but she always asks the doorman to turn him away.

It’s a Friday night, and Eleanor knows there’s an important family function going on because she was involved in planning it—she’s trying not to think about it. It means when there’s a knock on the door she doesn’t even think to look before answering it. Even though Astrid has moved to New York, she’s the only one who gets up this far other than management or food Eleanor has ordered.

It’s not Astrid though, it’s Nick.

She doesn’t shut the door fast enough, and he holds it open.

“You have somewhere to be,” she tells her son, voice tight. “Please leave.”

“I’m not going without you,” Nick says, stubborn, eyes shining with a love Eleanor knows she doesn’t deserve, any more than she does his loyalty in showing up here. “I’m heir to father’s company. I know you’re divorced now, but that doesn’t mean you’re not part of the family, and I’m not going to let him or Ah Ma pretend it does.”

Her stupid, brave, Americanized son. Of course he doesn’t realize that they don’t need him, wouldn’t want him at all if it weren’t for Eleanor’s sacrifice, her careful effort that he wanted to throw away on some girl (that Eleanor did throw away on the same girl).

She’s not going to let her son ruin his life on ideals, and especially not over her.

“I will be unable to attend future family events,” she tells him. “So there is no point in making a fuss about it. I am moving to New York with your cousin Astrid.”

Nick looks confused for a moment, and then his face clears. “To be with Rachel?” he asks, and he looks a little hurt but also hopeful, and he would think that, Eleanor thinks.

“Yes,” she says, and plasters on a fake smile she hopes years spent in the company of his Ah Ma instead of her will make him unable to see through. “To be with Rachel.”

She manages to get him to go to the party, to not make a scene, and then she starts packing her things. Better to go soon, before Nick comes back, before he changes his mind and tries to throw his future away again.

Astrid is surprised, when she gets the call, but she books the flight, and the next day, Eleanor, with a porter in tow lugging her bags, takes up residence in Astrid’s apartment building, in the penthouse suite directly below Astrid’s.

*

It’s Eleanor who calls Rachel first, before Astrid or Peik Lin can even let her know Eleanor’s in town, and it’s confusing to say the least.

“I told Nick I moved here for you,” Eleanor tells her. “If he contacts you, I would appreciate if you didn’t tell him otherwise.”

“What?” Rachel asks. “Moved where? Eleanor, are you alright?”

“Good day,” Eleanor says, and hangs up the phone.

It’s the first Rachel has heard from her since Eleanor turned her down, since their affair went public, and it makes sense, that it would be a weird cryptic phone call. She calls Astrid instead of calling Eleanor back, and Astrid just heard Eleanor was coming the day before, doesn’t know any of the details. She gives Rachel Eleanor’s apartment number.

When Eleanor comes to the door, she still looks sad, but with more purpose, pride than a lot of the times Rachel has last seen her, and even if Rachel doesn’t know the specifics, it’s not hard to figure out this move has been about protecting Nick somehow.

“Are you alright?” Rachel asks, and Eleanor just smiles.

“I moved half way around the world because of a scandal,” Eleanor says. “But now that I’m here, I might as well reap the benefits.”

Rachel rolls her eyes. What she was looking for was some actual emotional honesty, but that would be too much to expect from this relationship, and if Eleanor just wants to have sex… she’s still into it. At least this is normal for them, this kind of laced innuendo.

“You sure know how to make a girl feel special,” she says, and Eleanor crosses to the fancy couch, grabs a pillow, and Rachel doesn’t know what she’s doing until she’s brought it over to where Rachel is standing by the closed door, dropped it, and knelt on top of it in front of Rachel.

“Will this suffice?” she asks, and then she’s lifting up Rachel’s dress. And they’ve been ‘seeing each other’ for months now—Rachel knows Eleanor as a person now, for better or for worse, not just as the fantasy of the hot bitchy older lady she had a crush on. Absurdly that makes Rachel even more attracted to the woman kneeling in front of her. Not just the graceful arch of her eyebrow, the smug smile curling around her lips, but her drive, how she can be funny sometimes, when Rachel’s not expecting it, how fearless she’s been in trying new things with Rachel after the first time, even though Rachel can usually tell she’s working through discomfort about them.

This, Eleanor kneeling for her, is new, and it’s embarrassing how ready Rachel is. When Eleanor tugs her underwear down around her ankles, puts her mouth on her, grips Rachel’s hips, all Rachel can do is grab at the door frame (she tries not to grab Eleanor’s hair because it makes her mad, and not in a good way) and hang on.

It’s been months since they’ve seen each other. Rachel stays in the apartment for most of the day—how long they used to spend in each other’s company—and she presses Eleanor down on the bed, and Eleanor holds Rachel over her lap and fucks her from behind, and they watch American news for a while, recovering. Later, Rachel helps with the simpler kitchen tasks while Eleanor seemingly effortlessly throws together three courses of fancy food for dinner, including some incredible (and expensive) Silkie Chicken and Abalone soup she “just happened” to have the ingredients for lying around.

“I’m not sure how long I’m going to be here,” Eleanor says before Rachel leaves, because she does have class to teach in the morning. “But you are welcome to come visit me as long as you call first.”

“Thank you,” Rachel says, and means it, and refrains from saying anything about how long it took her to instill that habit in Eleanor.

It’s all she can think about on the train ride home—Eleanor living in the same city as her, less than an hour away. Will that mean seeing each other more than a couple of times a month, and is Rachel ready for that? Will it be the same frequency, and if so will it feel like they’re avoiding each other? Will that be weird?

She thinks about it as she goes to work the next day, and then as she leaves work, and when she gets to Astrid and Peik Lin’s apartment the next evening, tries to put it firmly out of her mind. She’s there to make cookies with Cassian before going to some rich people art show Astrid wanted to drag Rachel to, and she wants to be present for that.

And Rachel doesn’t know how it hadn’t occurred to her that of course Eleanor would be there too until Peik Lin gives Rachel a significant look while opening the door, and there she is at the stupidly large dining room table, helping her grand nephew make almond cookies.

It’s domestic, all of them making cookies together, in a way that’s jarring. It takes Rachel until they leave for the art show to realize why. Eleanor is not domestic with Rachel, not really. But Astrid is her niece, Cassian her grand nephew, so despite the previously chilly atmosphere between Eleanor and Astrid this makes sense—they are her family. Peik Lin is Astrid’s partner, sort of a co-parent to Cassian, despite Michael’s infrequent visits, so she’s almost included in that too, but Rachel’s presence in the apartment is just as easily explained away by her being Peik Lin and Astrid’s friend as it is her being Eleanor’s… whatever they are.

It hurts more than it should, realizing it.

*

The art show is like entering another world—like Astrid and Nick (and Eleanor)’s world in Singapore but not. However Astrid heard about this event, it wasn’t because she knew anyone who was going to be there. The room is full of well-dressed mostly white people, New York’s Elite, or some of them, and no one stares at the four of them any more than usual. (Except possibly Peik Lin, but that’s because she’s wearing a pantsuit with hot pink lions printed on it.)

Astrid doesn’t seem to be there to buy anything, but she looks, and Rachel follows her and Eleanor around in equal measure. It’s less intimidating, following Astrid, because she and Eleanor are rarely out together in public and the last time they were was disastrous, but she doesn’t want to abandon Eleanor either, so: splitting her time.

It’s when she’s walking with Eleanor she notices this blank look, this little sneer she gets looking at certain appetizers being served, or certain decorations and not others, and Rachel can’t figure out what the difference is.

She puts it out of her mind—especially when she manages to convince Eleanor to leave the party for one of the single occupancy washrooms for a while (they’re already in disgrace anyway)—but it comes into focus the next time she sees Eleanor at her apartment. It’s about a week and a half later, and Rachel is uncomfortably aware they’re having sex right below where Astrid is hosting some of Cassian’s friends from school for a play date, and Eleanor tells Rachel she’s starting a job.

*

Possibly the strangest thing for Eleanor about living in New York has been all the free time. She has never been a stranger to hard work, and no matter what Rachel or some other Americans might think, running a household and raising a family is hard work. But it’s not her work anymore. And Astrid isn’t as well off as she was, Eleanor can’t expect her to keep providing free apartments, family or not. She has known since moving here she needs to find something else to do.

It’s Astrid who gives her the idea—her and Peik Lin, who still makes Eleanor bristle, but… Eleanor is involved with Rachel. She hardly has room to judge, anymore.

So Eleanor mentions looking for work, stiff, asks if Astrid has any advice, which really means—Eleanor has no idea where to start but won’t, can’t admit this. Astrid says something about how skilled Eleanor was at what she did—and Peik Lin says that basically amounts to being skilled at being rich. And then her eyes get wide and she starts snapping, dives for her computer.

“Consulting,” Peik Lin says, a few minutes later, peering out from over her laptop. “You’re a Young. People like my family want to imitate you but don’t even know where to start. That’s what Rachel and I were watching you do at the gallery, right? You know what’s old, classy rich and what’s new, fake rich without even thinking about it.”

“I’m not a Young anymore,” Eleanor says stiffly, and Peik Lin rolls her eyes in a way that Eleanor finds entirely too familiar.

“You were a Young long enough, and your family was old money too. There are a lot of people in this city who will pay a lot for that knowledge.”

She lets Peik Lin and Astrid set it up, hoping it comes across as letting them help her instead of that this is something else she hasn’t learned how to do while the working world moved on around her. She won’t be working for anyone else either, which makes her feel better.

Astrid calls a friend to set up a website—classier than what Peik Lin would have done, Eleanor can only hope—and then she gets in touch with some of her contacts, and Peik Lin does the same, and before Eleanor knows it she has a work email account with several eager messages on it, people who want to pay her money to judge them.

It’s a lot better than she was expecting.

*

It’s both embarrassing and sort of terrifying when Rachel realizes the extent of Singapore’s anti-gay laws. Embarrassing because it’s taken her so long and terrifying because even aside from Eleanor, Astrid and Peik Lin having lived there, it’s not like Rachel would have been exempt from legal consequences as a foreigner when she was visiting.

It wasn’t something that came up when she was there the first time with Nick, and she knew Ollie was gay then, and it was fine, and… the more she looks into it the more she realizes it isn’t fine, really.

She asks Peik Lin about it, when Astrid is out on business and Cassian is at school, and Peik Lin tells Rachel, “It’s not enforced. Except for if someone wants to fuck with someone politically. But we’re not important enough to… oh.”

They’re both quiet for a while.

“It’s really not enforced,” Peik Lin says. “Basically no one’s actually gone to jail for it, and when they have it’s all been for other reasons really.”

“Still,” Rachel says. “I’m glad you’re all here.”

And none of them have talked about it like it’s a permanent thing, and it’s not like America isn’t a garbage fire for other reasons, but it’s one more reason she hopes they decide to stay.

*

Life in New York goes on, too. Despite what she said to Rachel at first, Eleanor doesn’t actually seem to be getting ready to leave any time soon, and the last few times Rachel has gone to visit her, they’ve talked about her new consulting business.

Rachel doesn’t really understand what she does, but only in the way that there are a lot of things about the Young family she doesn’t really understand. If someone wants to pay Eleanor what Rachel can only assume is a ridiculous amount of money (judging by the increasingly extravagant ingredients in Eleanor’s cooking) to tell them which nearly blank canvasses to display in their third summer home in the Hamptons, then that’s good for them.

They see each other more often, anyway, and Rachel doesn’t realize until one of her colleagues invites her to a barbecue on Friday night that she spends most of her Friday evenings stretched out on Eleanor’s bed doing her best to make her laugh as well as moan, most of her Saturday mornings in the apartment upstairs eating dim sum with Eleanor, Astrid, Peik Lin and Cassian.

“Yeah, you’re busy,” her colleague says, unimpressed. “Just bring whoever it is you’re seeing with you. It’s been like a year now, hasn’t it?”

A year. The same amount of time Rachel had been seeing Nick, before everything. She’d known on some level, it shouldn’t be so jarring, but it still is.

A year of dating Nick had been dates at cheap sushi places, going to his basketball games, planning to move in together near the end, planning to spend their lives together.

A year of seeing Eleanor had been seeing each other once or twice a month at first, a lot of truly excellent sex, after Eleanor got used to the different mechanics and mindset around it, and then Eleanor’s life falling down around her, followed by more domesticity by proxy than Rachel has ever had with a partner via Astrid being Eleanor’s family and Rachel’s friend and living so close.

It hits her that she has no idea what the shelf life on this kind of relationship is, what the road map is. With Nick, before the disastrous meeting with his family, everything was clear—a familiar script. With Eleanor, she doesn’t know where they’ll be in another month, let alone next year.

It’s probably a bad idea, inviting Eleanor Sung to the NYU economics faculty barbecue. That she’s gone back to her maiden name doesn’t make her any less conspicuous, and seeing her once a week doesn’t make the look on her face when Rachel’s asked any easier to read.

“A barbecue,” she says. “With your coworkers.”

“I can’t promise anything about the food,” Rachel says. “I mean, it’ll be white people food—burgers, that sort of thing. But I don’t know how it’ll be. It’s in the department head’s backyard. You don’t have to come. I just… I said I would go, and I’m normally here on Fridays, so.”

Eleanor watches her for another minute, and Rachel wishes she knew what she was thinking. More time with her—and time with Astrid too—has made it a little easier to figure out, but it’s nothing like when she was with Nick. Nick, who smiled easily and always told her how he was feeling, and… didn’t tell Rachel about his crazy rich family for an entire year, and now she’s seeing his mother. Probably not the best comparison.

“I’ll come,” Eleanor says, and Rachel’s not sure if that’s the outcome she wanted or not.

*

Peik Lin thinks the barbecue thing is hilarious, of course, and offers to come with Rachel as a buffer. Honestly, Rachel doesn’t think it would be a bad idea, but the invite said significant others only so she tells Peik Lin maybe not this time. Not because she doesn’t think they would be flexible, but because she wouldn’t put it past the department head to assume Rachel had more than one significant other, with all of her caginess, recently, and she doesn’t want Peik Lin to launch into an account of how, exactly, they are connected.

When she shows up at the apartment to pick Eleanor up, she’s wearing one of her ‘impress the nouveau riche’ outfits, and Rachel debates for a second or two before telling her, “You might want to change.”

“Why?” Eleanor asks. “You said it was a work function. I will be meeting your coworkers.”

“My coworkers are professors,” Rachel says. “They’re probably going to be wearing button-ups and jeans. You can wear whatever you want, I just…” she searches for words. She doesn’t really like bringing her past with Nick up around Eleanor, but it happened, and it’s not like anyone is ever going to forget that.

“Nick didn’t warn me that I was going to stick out wearing what I was planning to wear to meet you for the first time. Peik Lin figured it out and helped me pick a dress the day of. You can wear whatever you want, I just want you to know in advance what everyone else is going to be wearing and what will be expected.”

Eleanor watches her for a long moment, and it’s such a small thing, but somehow, Rachel feels laid bare.

“Thank you,” she says. “I will change. I’ll just be a moment.” She disappears back down the hallway to her bedroom, giving Rachel a look over her shoulder as she goes, and Rachel reminds herself that they’re going to a work function, enough people are going to be looking as is, she really doesn’t need to make them late.

When Eleanor comes back her outfit is still stunning, but it’s at least the kind of thing that doesn’t look as expensive as it probably is. When Eleanor is dressing for her consulting work, especially during first meetings, she’s recognized that a lot of her clients aren’t actually able to recognize how her more impressive clothing is subtler and she usually dresses to make her wealth more obvious to them at first. (Recognizing quality in clothing is one of the later lessons, often, one Rachel has heard bits of through Eleanor talking about work. She’s getting really interested, from an economics perspective.)

The barbecue goes weirdly well all things considered. Eleanor has a limo waiting for them downstairs, but she has the sense to have it stop a block away from the address Rachel gives the driver. Of course that doesn’t stop any of Rachel’s coworkers from noticing, and asking her about all of the big spending.

Rachel ignores them, says, “this is my…” and falters, because she and Eleanor have never actually talked about labels and they definitely should have before Rachel decided it was a good idea to introduce her to the people Rachel worked with.

“Eleanor,” Eleanor says, sticks her hand out, smiling, and Rachel kind of can’t believe she forgot how actually charming Eleanor can be when she wants to be. She’s never really wanted to be charming to Rachel, apparently, which after a minute of thinking about it Rachel decides to take as a compliment. Mostly.

It does make meeting all of Rachel’s coworkers easier, and Eleanor just tells them she does consulting when they ask, and then, just as they’re about to start the food, Peik Lin strolls in, Astrid right behind her, greeting Rachel’s department head like they’re old friends because, apparently, they are.

“Oh was this the barbecue you were going to?” she asks Rachel in totally fake surprise when Rachel gets to her, and Rachel rolls her eyes.

“You definitely knew this is where we were coming.”

“I did,” Peik Lin says, and then Astrid is giving Rachel a hug, greeting Eleanor, and then Astrid and Peik Lin flit around being social. It’s also… not that weird. Rachel really needs to reevaluate her life that this feels not that weird. Probably the funniest part about it is that Peik Lin is wearing the fanciest-looking outfit out of any of them, which leads to her getting the most (subtle) looks, and Rachel manages to avoid getting asked about how they all know each other until after dinner. Even then, she just says Peik Lin was her college roommate, and that seems to be enough.

There is karaoke, and Peik Lin starts rapping, and Rachel should possibly be grateful to her for taking the attention off of her and Eleanor. She’s fantastic also—the two of them did a lot of karaoke in college and Rachel has no trouble admitting when she’s beat.

And then, before she knows it, they’re shutting the karaoke machine down because of local noise bylaws, and Rachel’s boss wishes them all a nice weekend, and she and Eleanor and Astrid and Peik Lin pile back into the limo.

(The one awkward moment, of course, was when one of the adjunct professors, Mike, drunk, asked Rachel when she and Nick had broken up, and why she didn’t call him. Peik Lin, not Eleanor, was with her for that one, and she just said, “It was over a year ago, and she didn’t call you because she got a better offer. Have you seen that woman?! Damn!” Rachel only wanted to kill her a little. But also, Mike was terrible.)

“How long have you known you were attracted to women?” Rachel asks, when they’re both naked and catching their breaths, lying on the ridiculous thread count sheets in Eleanor’s apartment. It’s not quite what Rachel wants to know, but she can’t figure out the right question.

Eleanor pauses in stroking Rachel’s hair for a moment before going back to it.

“As long as I can remember,” she says.

“Did you ever tell anyone?” Rachel asks, and she can feel Eleanor shake her head by the movement of the pillow.

“It wasn’t relevant,” she says. “I was attracted to men too. I didn’t even know the word for it when I married Phillip.”

It makes sense in the way that Rachel isn’t going to question her further about it. When Rachel was figuring her own sexuality out, she didn’t hear the word bisexual until she was in high school, didn’t actually date a girl until her sophomore year of college. She has no idea what it would have been like for Eleanor growing up.

“Why did you kiss me, at the party?” Rachel asks. Eleanor is quiet for a while. Rachel thinks this might be one of the most personal conversations they’ve had.

“I couldn’t stop thinking about you,” Eleanor says. “I kept expecting you to come back to Singapore. When I found out you dated women…” She trails off. That Eleanor had known in advance is a surprise, and a conversation Rachel definitely wants to have another time. “I wanted to see what it was like,” Eleanor says finally, and then laughs. “A moment of weakness.”

But she keeps stroking Rachel’s hair, and Rachel isn’t sure whether she still thinks of it as a moment of weakness or not. And it’s hard to get offended anymore by the things that would have hurt her a year ago. Eleanor is here, and has let Rachel into her life, and has family breakfast with her, and came to Rachel’s work thing.

“The barbecue was nice, despite the food,” Eleanor says, and Rachel can’t help the smile that comes to her face at that.

She says, “it was,” thinks that maybe she needs to stop measuring this relationship by all of the others in her past because they’re not comparable, for a variety of different reasons. And this is where she wants to be now.

“Do you want to meet my mother?” she asks Eleanor, because really, it probably has been long enough and as far as she can tell, neither of them are going anywhere fast.

“I’ve already met your mother,” Eleanor says, and Rachel rolls her eyes, swats her bare stomach.

“Do you mind if I invite my mother to family breakfast next Saturday?” she tries again, and only realizes after, when Eleanor has tensed just a little, that she’s never called it that out loud before.

“That’s fine,” Eleanor says, and Rachel rolls over and kisses her again.

Eleanor is weirdly quiet during breakfast the next morning, but Rachel thinks it makes sense. When she asks, Eleanor says she’s fine, and Rachel and doesn’t press her about it. She’s had a ‘no mind reading’ rule in her relationships for a while—something Nick was fine with the letter of if not the spirit—and she and Eleanor have talked about it before, even if it was before they lived in the same city, before their relationship took on more significance. If Eleanor wants to talk to her about it Rachel hopes she will, and if not, ‘fine’ is what she’ll go with.

Peik Lin regales Cassian with stories about her karaoke prowess, and does one of the raps she did last night for him, and then starts talking about her and Rachel’s adventures in college.

“…And she knew the girl I liked was right outside the door and she opened it right when I was singing the Thong Song and I wanted to kill her.”

“What’s the thong song?” Cassian asks, and Astrid gives Peik Lin a fond yet exasperated look.

“It’s a song about sandals,” Astrid tells him.

“…It was embarrassing,” Peik Lin says, trying to recover. “Trust me.”

“I’m not sorry,” Rachel says, grinning at her across the table. “You got a date out of that too.”

Eleanor huffs a laugh, and touches Rachel’s leg under the table, and Rachel thinks that maybe they are okay after all.

*

Living in New York is different than living in Singapore. Eleanor knew it would be, had already found it different when she was living away from her husband, her mother-in-law, from Nick, but New York is unfamiliar in a way she wasn’t expecting. Her days are filled with inspecting her new clients’ tacky homes, and teaching Cassian how to play mahjong, and going out with Rachel, or Astrid, or Rachel, Astrid and Peik Lin, and despite all of these things to do, she still has more time to herself than she felt like had before. It’s not a small thing, the absence of Su Yi’s disapproving presence, the way Eleanor no longer has to bear her criticism.

It makes her uncomfortable how much easier she feels without the weight of that burden, and she tries to put it out of her mind. Tries not to think too hard about how this is the most time she’s spent with Cassian in his life, maybe the most time she’s spent actually talking with Astrid.

They go for brunch, the Tuesday after Rachel tells Eleanor she’s inviting her mother for dim sum the next week. It’s not the first time they’ve been, and the restaurant that Eleanor actually heard about from one of her clients offers enough privacy that she feels comfortable speaking mostly freely.

“I’m sorry,” Eleanor tells Astrid at some point, while they’re waiting for the waiter to bring them another pot of green tea. “For how I treated you, when you started seeing Peik Lin.”

“It’s alright,” Astrid says, and then smiles, shakes her head. “It’s not alright, but I understand. I understood then too, I think. It wasn’t good for the family. I know you’ve spent your whole life thinking about that. What’s best for them.”

“I did love Phillip once,” Eleanor says, which isn’t really an answer. And she had. She was raised with her own family’s expectations, and those were to make a good match, a match that would be good for her family. It was convenient that Phillip had been that as well as a man she loved. It was less so that she hadn’t been considered a good match by his mother. What might have stayed an inconvenience to an American like Rachel was far more so when Eleanor, of course, found herself living in Su Yi’s house, living with the disapproval every day, even tempered as it was by Phillip’s pride in her for handling it, for doing everything she could—even if he didn’t notice all of it—to give Nick his best chance.

She isn’t sure when the love waned, between them, knows it was some time before Nick went to boarding school, but—it hadn’t really mattered.

“We’ve both disappointed our families now,” Eleanor says, and she doesn’t mean it to be cruel, even though it comes out with a bit of a bitter laugh.

“I think they’ve disappointed us too,” Astrid says with a slight, pained smile, and Eleanor wonders for the first time if she’s talked to her parents at all since moving to New York. They were closer when Astrid was young, before she married Michael—the first disappointment, Eleanor knows. Phillip’s sister used to bring her by the house all the time to play with Nick and there was a closeness between them that Eleanor always envied. They still talked after Michael, but it was different, and Eleanor isn’t sure she’s seen them together at all at a family function since Astrid started seeing Peik Lin.

There’s a tight, uncomfortable feeling her chest, and she reaches out and squeezes Astrid’s hand and Astrid squeezes back, smiles at her.

“I’m glad you’re here,” she tells Eleanor, and Eleanor thinks that maybe she is too.

*

Cassian and Astrid haven’t met Rachel’s mother before, but of course they’re still more relaxed than Eleanor is about the whole thing. In the morning, when Rachel was leaving Eleanor’s apartment to go get her mother, Eleanor tried to offer to pay for a limo, or at least a car, to go pick her up with, and they went back and forth about it with gradually sharper tones.

Eventually, Rachel fixed her with a look and said, “Eleanor, you can pay for a car to bring my mother here if you want to, but you really don’t have to, okay?”

Immediately wrong-footed by the change in tactics, Eleanor scowled at her. “Your mother is meeting me for the first time as your…” they still hadn’t talked about labels. “Companion. The last time she met me, I had just broken up your relationship with my son. I want to impress her.”

Rachel’s ‘no mind-reading rule’ is something that Eleanor has to admit has made certain disagreements easier, even when it irritates her.

“First of all, I broke up my own relationship with Nick, but… okay. Thank you for explaining.” Rachel smiled and leaned forward to kiss her.

Eleanor pulled back, still confused. “You’ve never been bothered by my money before,” she said. “Why are you now?”

Rachel rolled her eyes, and Eleanor knew enough to know it was a fond gesture. “I’m an economist, Eleanor, I know that money is mostly bullshit. If you want to hear about it sometime when my mother is not expecting me to pick her up, I would love to tell you all about it.”

Eleanor was sure she would too—Rachel was passionate about what she did.

“It’s fascinating how much money you have—I mean, how much money your family has, even how much you have now which is basically just, you making money by having had money before…” her eyes glazed over for a moment before she seemed to snap herself out of it. “But I know I can’t compete with you, or Astrid, or even Peik Lin by paying for things—I know it doesn’t mean the same thing to any of you as it does to me. I just…” she levelled Eleanor with a look. “You don’t have to use your money to impress my mother. Being nice to her would probably work just as well or better.”

“Would it be better to pay for the car or not?” Eleanor snapped. Rachel shook her head, crossed the room to her and took her hands, held them down at her sides, pressed a kiss to her lips.

“Not everything has to be about winning,” she said. “Impressing my mother is not life or death. If you two don’t get along maybe you will next time.”

Eleanor decided to pay for the car, and Rachel thanked her, and kissed her again, and left, and now Eleanor is up in Astrid’s apartment, surveying the table where the caterer has unpacked all of the food and just waiting for the door to open. Open, not ring, because Astrid gave Rachel a key when she gave Eleanor one, on Peik Lin’s condition that both of them call ahead before actually using it (which is not a rule Eleanor has been particularly interested in breaking).

And she knew that Rachel’s mother knew about her, of course, from the disastrous way their affair imploded in the media, all of those months ago, but she’s still unprepared for the smile she gets in greeting, the “nice to see you again,” from the woman whose hidden past she dragged out into the open in a calculated attempt to hurt Rachel when she first met her.

But Rachel’s smiling at her, and Rachel’s mother has moved on to greeting Cassian, who is about as thrilled to meet her as she is to meet him, and all Eleanor can do is smile back.

Breakfast itself goes well.

Astrid is charming on purpose, and Peik Lin and Cassian seem to be effortlessly charming, and Eleanor does her best and has no idea if it’s working or not. Rachel’s mother enjoys the meal at least, and tells Eleanor to call her Kerry, and when Cassian moves most of the adults to where the cartoons are, Eleanor stays behind, wants to give Rachel’s mother a chance to talk to her alone, if that’s what she wants. It’s what Eleanor would want, in her position.

“Did Rachel tell you what really happened, with my husband?” is what Kerry says though, and Eleanor shakes her head. It hasn’t come up. She imagined it would be something more than what was on paper, given the bond between Rachel and her mother, but she hadn’t thought to ask.

Kerry tells her. The abuse, the affair, leaving for America with her daughter.

“My husband was a good man,” Eleanor says. It wasn’t Phillip’s fault, what happened.

“Maybe,” Kerry says. “But you can see why I would be happy for you, leaving a life you couldn’t bear for whatever reason.”

Eleanor can see why Kerry would despise her, for what she did to Rachel’s relationship with her son.

“That doesn’t mean I’m happy Rachel chose you. You hurt her badly before, and you tried to drive a wedge between us for your own gain.” That hadn’t been the intention, but of course, Eleanor then hadn’t cared about the consequences, whatever they were. She hadn’t cared about Rachel.

“But I want her to be happy,” Kerry says. “If you’re what makes her happy, then make her happy.” She fixes Eleanor with a look. “Don’t hurt my daughter.”

Eleanor can’t help but say it. “I don’t understand the American obsession with happiness.”

“I’m not sure I do either, in the same way that she does,” Kerry says, smiling over at Rachel for a minute. “And I know you want to do what’s best for your family. But I think your family is here now.”

Watching Rachel and Cassian sitting together on the floor by the television, Astrid and Peik Lin pressed together on the couch, Eleanor thinks, for the first time, that she can see it.

*

Eleanor hasn’t been paying a lot of attention to the calendar. What used to be a highly regimented schedule with certain family events at certain times of year—and Eleanor in charge of managing most of it—has blurred together in New York, where events she goes to (with Rachel, Astrid, Peik Lin, sometimes Cassian, mostly strangers) can be at any time, where ‘family breakfast’ is every week, where she and Rachel have dinner with Rachel’s mother every once in a while—not really on a schedule.

Even if she were paying attention to the calendar enough to notice it coming up further than a week in advance, Eleanor isn’t sure she would have done much to mark her birthday. In Singapore, of course, it meant a big family dinner, passing red pockets to her younger nieces and nephews as they wished her well. When Nick was little, he would bring her breakfast in bed that he’d usually prepared with some of the help, and in later years, when Nick was away at school, Eleanor had brunch with the members of her bible study group. In New York, Astrid and Cassian are all she has for family.

It’s a Saturday, so Rachel will probably be there, and that’s really the only thought going through her mind when she wakes up and the bed is empty. She only briefly has time to be disappointed before she hears a noise and relaxes back against the pillows, adjusts the strap of her camisole on her shoulder. Coming back, then. But it’s not Rachel who comes through the door holding a tray, it’s Cassian, and behind him is Astrid and… Nick.

Eleanor can’t stop the tears that sting her eyes, can only do her best to blink them away as her son, her niece and her grand nephew approach with the food.

“Happy birthday, Mom,” Nick says, grinning at her, and she reaches out, clasps his hand so tightly her knuckles go white. Her son.

“Happy birthday Auntie Eleanor!” Cassian says. They have almost the same smile.

“Thank you,” Eleanor tells both of them, and holds Astrid’s gaze for a moment longer. She’s standing further back, a little, but Eleanor can tell this was because of her, even though Nick would have flown himself out. Her family. Even when she notices Astrid discreetly toeing away a pair of Rachel’s underwear before Nick or Cassian can see it, she’s only fondly exasperated. This gift is probably a bit because of Rachel too. It feels wrong to think of how she’ll thank her later when she’s sitting in bed with her family though, her son who has brought her breakfast. She tables it for later.

She gets to spend the whole day with Nick, with him showing her around his favourite places in New York. Some of them are familiar from Rachel and some of them are new. Some of them seem so like her son they make her heart ache, and one is a disgusting looking gym where Nick tells her he used to play basketball. Which, when she thinks more about it, sounds like her son too.

It’s nice. It feels like the sort of easy relationship they had before he left for New York, before Rachel. Eleanor doesn’t know if it will ever fully heal between them, what happened, but she thinks they can at least make a start of it.

Nick is enjoying being back in Singapore at least. Working with the company is what he’s spent his whole life planning for, and he is doing that, but he’s brought some of his New York life with him too. He’s convinced Colin to play basketball with him, and that’s going well. She’s happy for him.

There’s a dinner that night, too, and it turns out Nick flew Oliver out for the occasion too, and bought out an entire restaurant for the night—a Singaporean restaurant on the top floor of an office building, with a beautiful view of the river. It’s the kind of place the family would have bought out for a function in Singapore too, but tonight, Nick paying for the whole restaurant was just for privacy, not because they had that many people to accommodate.

And it is a ‘family’ birthday dinner—with Rachel, and Astrid, and Peik Lin and Cassian, and even Rachel’s mother, who’s warming up to her a little. Surrounded by all of these people in her life, Eleanor’s heart has never felt so full.

*

“I can’t believe Nick bought out the entire restaurant just for dinner,” Rachel says that night, in Eleanor’s bed again. She’s staying more nights, lately. Eleanor isn’t sure if she’ll ever ask her to marry her, or even to move in—she is enjoying her space—but she’s been toying with the idea of giving her a key. It’s nice having her around.

“It’s no less than I would have done back home,” Eleanor gives voice to her earlier thought, and Rachel scoffs at her, though Eleanor can hear the smile in her voice.

“You guys are all just rich. I can’t even wrap my mind around it sometimes and I’m an economics professor.” She pauses, shifts around, and props her head up on her elbow so she can look down at Eleanor. “When we were talking the other week, I was thinking. Would you mind if I wrote a book on you? I mean not you in particular but just… economics of the extremely rich, using you and some of your family as examples.”

Eleanor’s not sure if that’s something that should be flattering or not, but Rachel sounds so excited, so of course she agrees. “I can only agree for myself,” she says, and Rachel smiles, flaps her hand at her.

“Astrid and Peik Lin will agree. I’m sure Nick will agree. We’re going for lunch tomorrow, by the way, before he flies back. He wanted to talk, see if we can maybe be friends again. I know you have that client meeting, but if you want to meet us after just text me and I’ll tell you where we are.”

Before, this would have made Eleanor concerned and guilty, and now she’s just happy that they might be able to rekindle their friendship. It’s still awkward, of course, but Rachel is someone she wants to be happy now almost as much as she wants Nick to be. Happiness. That thing they both so value.

“Are you happy?” she asks Rachel, because in that moment she wants to hear it. Rachel’s smile is contagious—Eleanor can’t keep the echo of it off her face.

“I am,” Rachel says. “Are you?”

“Yes,” Eleanor says. Rachel lies back down, throws one arm over Eleanor’s chest and presses her face close to her neck. It’s not everything, this feeling, but it’s wonderful anyway. It’s a start.

*

(Rachel’s book is published two years later, and Astrid hosts an extravagant launch party in a bar she rented out downtown. It was supposed to be called An Economic Survey of Singapore’s Ultra-Rich, but Rachel’s publisher, hoping for a more commercial success, changed the name to Crazy Rich Asians. Rachel hated it at first, but Eleanor and Astrid liked it, and Peik Lin thought it was hilarious. It’s kind of growing on her.)