Over the years, she learnt that there were a lot of ways she could spell her name.
1. Leah- From the Hebrew name (Le'ah) which was probably derived from the Hebrew word (le'ah) meaning "weary".
2. Lai- From the name of a state called Lai in ancient China. Descendants of the ruling class of this state adopted its name as their surname.
3. Leyh- According to her friend, Tonya's, indisputable knowledge. Absolutely meaningless.
As a young girl of twelve, with access to nothing but the school library's hole-in-corner books, she did whatever she could to dig into the meaning of all these names but none could meet up to the highly noble ancestry she had fancied for herself. And so she fell back to using the word 'Leh', until she could come across something appropriate and fitting.
She wouldn't- until four years later.
This confusion would never have bothered her, she would have accepted anything that her father said was correct or her mother said should go down on her name slips in school. She would have been just as fine with Leah as she would have been with Cat or Rat, had they only been there to tell her.
But they hadn't, so she guessed that was a fight she'd have to learn to fight on her own- the identity hunt.
But that was one fight she didn't have to fight on her own. When she died that night under the Bo tree and he first took her hand into his own and wrote on it three simple letters, she knew that had to be it.
'Lei,' he had whispered, 'like a soft wreath of flowers,'
He wrote on her arm, and Lei knew that this had to be it- not because its meaning was something spectacular, but because he had given a whole new meaning to the word.
L-E-I