Eleanor banged down her chopsticks irritatedly. “You think I’m pressuring you? Hiyah, you don’t know the meaning of pressure! When your father and I came back from our honeymoon, your darling Ah Ma commanded her maids to ransack our luggage! When she found our French letters,* she got so upset, she said that if I wasn’t pregnant within six weeks, she would throw me out of the house! Do you really want to know what it took for me to get pregnant? Your father and I had to—”

“Stop, stop! Boundaries, please! I don’t need to know any of this!” Nick groaned, waving his hand in front of his mother’s face frantically.

“Believe me, I’m not trying to pressure you to have a child. I’m only trying to help you!”

“Help me how? By trying to ruin my marriage again?”

“Don’t you see? I thought if we caught Rachel at the right time in her cycle, we could just fly her to Singapore. Auntie Carol already offered to loan her new Gulfstream G650—it’s very fast and Rachel can be here in eighteen hours. She can even come this weekend. And my kang tao at Capella Resort can get me a nice ocean-view suite.”

“And then what?”

“Aiyah, you do your job and get her pregnant, and we can announce it immediately. And then maybe, just maybe, Ah Ma will agree to see you!”

Nick looked at his father incredulously. “Can you believe this?”

Philip simply put a char siew bao on Nick’s plate in a silent show of commiseration.

“Believe what? I am trying to do anything I can to get you into that damn house! Your best chance now is to get Rachel pregnant. We need to prove to Su Yi that you can actually produce the next heir to Tyersall Park.”

Nick sighed. “I don’t think that’s going to matter at this point, Mum.”

“Hnh! You don’t know your grandmother—she’s so old-fashioned. Of course it will matter to her! It will restore you into her good graces. She will have no choice but to see you!”

“Listen to me, Mum. Rachel is not going to get pregnant just so I can see Ah Ma. That’s the most ridiculous plan I’ve ever heard. You should stop all your ploys trying to get me into Tyersall Park. It’s only going to make things worse. I’ve actually made my peace with the whole situation. I came to Singapore, I offered to visit Ah Ma. If she doesn’t want to see me, I’ll get over it. At least I tried.”

Eleanor wasn’t listening to him. Instead, her eyes narrowed as a new thought entered her head. “Don’t tell me…hmm…Nicky, are you…how do they say it…robbing banks?”

Nick furrowed his brow in confusion. “Robbing banks? What do you mean? I do all my banking online these days, Mum.”

“Aiyah, when was the last time you went to see the doctor? Do you have a good urologist in New York?” Eleanor demanded.

Philip chuckled, realizing what his wife was talking about. “She means shooting blanks, Nicky.”

“Yes, yes, shooting blanks! Have you ever checked your sperm count? You used to play around with so many girls when you were younger, maybe you used all your good sperm up.”

“Oh my God, Mum. Oh my God.” Nick put his hand to his forehead and shook his head, completely mortified.

“Don’t ‘oh my God’ me. I’m dead serious,” Eleanor said indignantly as she chewed.

Nick got up from the table in a huff. “I’m not going to answer any more of these questions. It’s so weird and inappropriate! And don’t you dare bring any of this up with Rachel either. Have some respect for our privacy!”

“Okay lah, okay lah. Don’t be so sensitive. I wish we hadn’t sent you to school in England, I don’t know what kind of man they turned you into over there. Everything is so private-private with you, even medical issues. You’re my son—I’ve watched your nannies change your diapers, you know! Now, aren’t you going to eat any of the food we bought? The chwee kueh is extra good today,” Eleanor said.

“Not only have I completely lost my appetite but I’m going to meet Astrid for breakfast.”

“Aiyah, that poor girl. Did you read the latest gossip this morning?”

“No, Mum. I don’t pay attention to silly gossip,” Nick replied as he stormed out.

* * *

* Women of Eleanor’s generation—especially God-fearing MGS girls like Eleanor—were brought up using this quaint term for condoms.

CHAPTER EIGHT

EMERALD HILL, SINGAPORE

Since separating from Michael, Astrid had moved in to one of the heritage shop houses on Emerald Hill Road that she had inherited from her great-aunt Mathilda Leong. As Nick strolled down the street toward her place, he couldn’t help but stop along the way and admire some of the ornamental friezes, timber-framed windows, and elaborate entrance gates on the beautifully restored Peranakan-style terrace homes that made this street so unique.*1 No two façades were alike—each one blended different elements of Chinese baroque, late-Victorian, and art deco details.

When Nick was a child, many of these shop houses where old Peranakan families lived and worked had fallen into neglect and the street had an air of faded grandeur, but now that real estate prices had shot up to absurd levels and the neighborhood had been designated a conservation area, these houses had become highly coveted properties going for tens of millions. Many of them had been turned into hip bars or sidewalk cafés, leading some of Nick’s snootier relatives to derisively refer to Emerald Hill Road as “that street where all the ang mor kow sai go to leem tzhiu,”*2 but Nick found it all rather charming. Arriving at a handsome white shop house with smoky gray shutters, he stopped and rang the doorbell.

A blond girl in her early twenties peered over the pintu pagar—an ornately carved wooden half door that was a typical feature of such houses—and asked in a heavy French accent, “Are you Nicolas?”

Nick nodded, and she slid the lock open to allow him to enter. “I’m Ludivine, Cassian’s au pair,” she said.

“Salut, Ludivine. Ça va?” Nick said with a smile.

“Comme ci comme ça,” Ludivine replied coquettishly, wondering why she’d never met madame’s hottie French-speaking cousin before.

Stepping into the front foyer, Nick could see that the room had been painstakingly restored to its original style. The floor was an elaborate mosaic of ceramic tiles painted in a William Morris–esque floral pattern, and intricately carved gilt wood screens created a partition between the front room and the rest of the house beyond. The centerpiece of a typical Peranakan front room was the ancestral shrine, and Astrid had honored the tradition by installing an elaborate Victorian altarpiece against the back wall. But instead of placing pictures of dead relatives or porcelain gods within the altar, she had cheekily hung a small Egon Schiele drawing of a nude male figure inside.

Ludivine led Nick from the front foyer through a darkened antechamber into the chimchay—the open courtyard exposed to the sky that provided the natural ventilation and lighting essential to these long, narrow shop houses. Here, Astrid had departed from tradition and completely transformed the space: The roof had been glassed in and the entire space air-conditioned, while the usual concrete floor was now covered in obsidian black tiles, making it shimmer like a pool of black ink.