“One of the women in your grandmother’s mahjong group comes once a week to clean. We pay her twenty dollars an hour, and she always stays for tea.”

So along with an employee and accountant, the Lins could also afford a housekeeper. A stranger, not Nan, had been dusting Ivy’s glass dog. Ivy thought of the designer clothes her family had worn to Thanksgiving at the Speyers’ house, a display that had horrified her at the time as a gaudy attempt to impress. But the new clothes, the upgraded, barely recognizable house, the credit card that Austin used indiscriminately, the checks Nan had sent Ivy to pay her rent and the wedding—it was clear now that none of these things had been face-saving gestures, as Ivy had assumed, but simply her parents’ real lives.

Mimi embraced Ivy when saying goodbye. “You’re even prettier than your photos,” she said.

Ivy recognized in the girl’s wistful voice a bad case of family crush. She was the object of a family crush.

Somewhere along the way, Shen and Nan had become businesspeople with a bit of wealth and power. The lie Ivy had been telling all along had come true.

* * *

STILL NO RESPONSE from Roux. Strange how one could get used to anything. The blind panic of before had receded, leaving behind a muted detachment. It was not resignation but a kind of gearing up. A feeling she was familiar with. She’d first felt it, at fourteen, rapping on Roux’s window with an orange-sized bruise on her head.

Meifeng was discharged on Tuesday morning. To celebrate, Nan ordered from the local Sichuan restaurant a feast of the Lins’ favorites: braised pork ribs with sweet potato, cold eggplant soaked in garlic and fresh chili peppers, marinated beef tongue, little oval slices of glutinous rice cakes glistening with oil atop a bed of leeks. Austin was coaxed down to dinner by the combined pressure of the entire family. He made an effort to shower and shave, arriving at the table wearing a pin-striped suit, silk tie and all, as if the clothes would trigger him into a different mode of living. Ivy had never seen anything so feeble in all her life. Nan smiled hopefully and Shen spoke in hearty tones about how much weight Austin had lost. None of them commented on the impracticality of eating oily food dressed in one’s best suit. Shen drank too much. Nan heaped meat into her children’s rice bowls. In other words, nothing had changed. At least on the surface. And yet Ivy saw that her father was drinking expensive liquor, not generic beer, and Nan wore a thin gold necklace over her turtleneck. Nan never used to wear jewelry. This new jewelry-wearing Nan ordered eighty-dollar takeout meals instead of scolding Meifeng for buying Austin a McDonald’s Happy Meal. There were a host of other flyers and coupons for Chinese restaurants clipped on the fridge, suggesting this was a usual occurrence. What luxury. Maybe she and Austin would have been different people if they’d grown up eating eighty-dollar Chinese takeout meals. Maybe this. Maybe that. Who knew what made you you. Ivy wished she knew.

She could hardly eat. She watched as Shen chuckled to himself over something Nan said. When Nan complained of a headache, he got up and went to fetch her a glass of water. They snapped at each other over various past grievances, not in a serious way, it was just how they talked, without awareness of the other person as other but only as an extension of speaking to themselves. Ivy wondered if she and Gideon would ever learn that intimate language of marriage. Would they have fights about laundry and cooking, pee in front of each other, argue about where to go on vacation? She could not imagine such a life with Gideon. Happiness with him had always been like an impressionist painting—one had to take a step back to appreciate the scene. Their marriage, if they married, would be like the peonies floating in the water bowl back in Ivy’s room at Finn Oaks: tranquil, elegant, unmarred by strife. What did it matter if she never experienced the mundane familiarity of the sort between her parents? She had never wanted that kind of love anyway. She had only ever wanted the picturesque, the heroic.

* * *

GIDEON SAID THE meeting with Costa Rica’s health minister had gone well. They would receive their funding check at a formal dinner on Friday. He asked after Meifeng’s recovery.

“Nothing can slow her down,” said Ivy. “She ate more than all of us combined, and was complaining that she wasn’t allowed to drink liquor.”

“I hope I’m that spirited when I’m eighty.”

“Eighty-seven.”

“Wow.”

Ivy heard a man’s voice in the background and Gideon turned away from the phone briefly to respond to him. It always made Ivy lonely to hear noisy gatherings in Gideon’s background. His life always seemed so busy without her; her phone line was always clear.

“How’s Costa Rica?” she asked.

“Humid. These mosquitoes are eating us alive down here. One of our engineers was sick all night from dinner.”

“You want to practice your speech with me?”

“You don’t mind?”

“Of course not.”

She waited as he went to fetch his computer. When he returned, she lay down diagonally on the bed, closed her eyes, and let the soothing cadence of his voice wash over her like a warm bath. Nan said that the secret to marriage was that you had to give a man something to fight for. But Gideon was not Shen Lin. He was not a fighter or a gambler, and he would not believe that a woman who’d been with another man could truly love him, could love him more purely because she had been with another man, to spare him her own depravity. Five days. Ivy tried to imagine the future waiting for her in five days. A Gideon-less future. It was as unimaginable to her as a formless desert upon which she would wander aimlessly, running through the shimmering heat toward golden palaces and lush palm trees that were not there.

* * *

SHE CRAWLED INTO bed that night with Meifeng. She wanted to lie still and lick her wounds, like a sick cat. Meifeng was surprised but pleased. “Just don’t kick me,” she warned. “I might break my other hip.”

Ivy asked if it’d hurt when she fell.

“A pinch. I called out for help but Shen wasn’t home, just your mother. She carried me on her back to the car and drove me to the hospital.” Meifeng sighed. “Nan’s not a young woman anymore. I didn’t think she’d have the strength. It’s good to have children, Baobao. They’re insurance for old age.”

“I don’t want kids,” said Ivy.

“To understand a parent’s love, you have to have kids yourselves.”

“It’s too risky. You have no idea what kind of monster will pop out of you.” Ivy knew now what kind of blood ran in her veins. It was no kind to pass on.

“Monster! What kind of stupid idea is that? If you don’t have kids, who will take care of you then if you fall in the shower?”

“A live-in nurse. Nurses don’t expect anything from you. You pay them to do a job. It’s clean and fair.”

Meifeng snorted. “There’s no outtalking you when you get like this.” She reached for her mug of tea, wincing a little with discomfort. “You’ve always had strange ideas about children. Remember the time you wet the bed because you saw that little ghost girl? You begged me to leave the light on.”

“I’d just watched The Exorcist.” Ivy laughed, then shivered. “I thought the devil that had possessed the girl would come through the TV and get me.” Her eight-year-old self had been frozen at the image of the black spirit entering her, turning her into a thrashing child-monster.

“But I didn’t keep it on,” said Meifeng. “Too wasteful, I thought. I’ve always regretted not providing you comfort that night. I keep imagining how scared you must have been to wet the bed. It’s strange to be old. All the little regrets keep you up at night.”

Ivy huddled her head reassuringly into Meifeng’s shoulder. After a silence, she murmured, “Do you believe that the bad things we’ve done come back to haunt us?”

“I can’t say I do. I’ve done plenty of bad things. I’ve been punished for some of them but overall, I’ve had a good life.” Ivy felt Meifeng’s body rise in a shrug. “Ask me after I’ve died. Maybe the punishment comes in the next life.”

“What bad things have you done?”

“Ha! What haven’t I done?” She began to list her sins in a grim voice that betrayed a hint of pride—Meifeng, at least, hadn’t changed much from the grandmother of Ivy’s youth. She still believed her wrongdoings were another form of survival, a method of getting the upper hand on a world that had always tried to get an upper hand on her.

All day long, Ivy’s mind had been a buzzard circling around something she couldn’t yet pin down. She thought of Roux, of the gun. She thought of Nan’s past, of Shen’s stoicism and ignorance, of Mimi the employee who was probably a better daughter than Ivy was to Nan and Shen, and of Austin’s fancy suit, and of family and money and past mistakes, and of Gideon, most of all, of Gideon.

“Have you ever killed anyone?” she interrupted Meifeng’s nostalgic monologue.

“Once,” said Meifeng, adjusting the blanket around her hips.