Chapter 4

Half an hour later, Rose was brought to the suite.

She was still in her faded work uniform. Faced with a room full of bodyguards in black and that imposing old man, she hunched her shoulders in fright.

His eyes snapped open, and he stared hard at her. "Ma'am, these pickles... who taught you to make them?"

The old man's look startled Rose. She stammered, "My... my mama taught me. It's a recipe that's been handed down in our family."

"Your mama?" Old Mr. Sterling's voice shook. "What's her name? How old is she? Where does she live?"

Damian frowned from the side. His father had never lost his composure like this.

"My mama's name is Mae Whitaker. She's eighty-two, and she lives out in the country near Millbrook, Kentucky..." Rose answered plainly.

"Mae... Mae..."

Charles kept repeating the name. Then he suddenly burst into loud sobs, like a child who had lost his favorite toy.

"Mae! It's me, Charlie! It's your Charlie!"

Everyone in the room was stunned.

Damian's face changed completely. "Dad, what are you saying? Didn't you tell me... that my real mother died back during the war..."

Tears streamed down the old man's face. He pointed at Rose, his finger trembling violently. "She... she's your own sister! That's your real mother!"

So it turned out that more than sixty years ago, Charles and Mae had been childhood sweethearts, and that special pickle recipe belonged to Mae's family alone.

Then war broke out everywhere, and Charles was forced to go overseas. After that, all contact was lost. He worked his way up abroad, and although he married another woman and had a son, he had always kept that girl who knew how to make pickles hidden in his heart.

He had searched his whole life and never found her.

He never imagined that at the very end of his life, he would taste this flavor again, in Dubai of all places.

He whipped his head around to Damian, his eyes razor-sharp. "Ready the plane! File a flight plan right now! I'm going to Millbrook! We leave now!"

Damian was thrown. "Dad, in your condition, the doctors said you can't take a long flight..."

"I'm not afraid of dying! I'm afraid of dying before I see her!" the old man roared, clutching the pickle crock tight in his hands. "Sixty years... I've searched for her for sixty years! And all this time she's been waiting for me..."

Damian had never seen his father lose control like this.

He glanced at Rose, who stood in the corner looking bewildered, and an absurd thought suddenly flashed through his mind:

If what his father said was true, then the woman named Mae Whitaker was the love of his father's life.

So this middle-aged housekeeper standing in front of him... was she actually... his own sister?

"Dad, don't get worked up. I'll send people to bring her here first," Damian said, trying to calm him.

"You don't know a damn thing!" The old man slammed his palm down on the table. "I'm going myself! I want the first face she sees to be mine! Not some strangers like you!"

There was no arguing with him. Damian had no choice but to have his private jet readied on an emergency basis.

Ten hours later.

Millbrook, Kentucky, at the edge of a small mountain town.

Several black Rolls-Royces with out-of-state plates crawled over the rutted dirt road under the townspeople's astonished stares and stopped in front of a run-down little farmhouse.

It was dusk.

The setting sun edged the shabby little yard in gold.

Rose helped Charles out of the car. He refused the wheelchair, straightened his collar, and even smoothed down his thin white hair with one hand, like a young man on his way to see his sweetheart.

In the yard, an old woman with a head full of silver hair sat in a cane chair, idly waving a palm-leaf fan now and then.

She seemed to sense something. Her hand stopped, and she slowly turned her head toward the gate.

Their eyes met.

The wind went still.

Charles gripped the fence gate so hard his knuckles turned white. His lips trembled. A thousand things he wanted to say came out as a single choked word:

"Mae..."

The old woman in the yard shuddered.

She narrowed her eyes at the old man standing against the light, and the fan slipped from her hand and hit the ground with a soft clatter.

Holding on to the cane chair, she rose shakily to her feet, her eyes instantly blurred with tears.

Across one low garden fence, across sixty years of wind, frost, rain, and snow, across half a century of separation by life and death, the two old people at last looked upon each other.