Caelia loved the scarf. It was a really lovely shade of blue and because she wasn’t the sort of person to wear silk scarves at all, she tied it around her schoolbag a couple of times so that she could run her hands along the soft fabric in class and look at it all the time. It really was a lovely present. She hadn’t written Jax back right away, instead tucking the note inside her desk between two unused envelopes, and mumbled a thank you to him the next day in class, cheeks pink because she hadn’t really expected a gift back.
She didn’t give Jax’s offer to study with her a second thought, instead twisting her hands over a letter she’d received from Matthew the next morning explaining that a complication had arisen but that he would be taking care of it and she needn’t worry. But Caelia was worried. He was so good to her to be taking care of all these things so that they could be together, but she still fretted that something would happen, that something would go wrong and mess everything up.
A few days later, however, as she was reaching for an envelope to mail a letter to her brother, the note from Jax fell out and when she saw it, she was suddenly compelled to write out another letter, this time one that wasn’t going all the way to China.