Mrs. Hale was up early that morning.

It was winter, the air thin and cold. With the Lunar New Year almost here, the Hale family's household staff had been running errands all day — cars rolling in and out of the courtyard, black exhaust puffing steadily into the pale sky, the whole place buzing with a festive kind of chaos.

But underneath all that noise, there was a loneliness that sat quiet and heavy.

Jeremy stood on the second-floor terace, ...