What if you ran off with the money without delivering the groceries, she thought, though it was unfair of her. There were men she knew she could trust, including, even, her dead husband.

On the drive back, Paul asked if the egret had returned. She hadn’t noticed, Auntie Mei replied. She wondered if she would have an opportunity to see the bird be taught its lesson: she had only twenty-two days left. Twenty-two days, and then the next family would pluck her out of here, egret or no egret. Auntie Mei turned to look at Baby, who was asleep in the car seat. ‘What will become of you then?’ she said.

‘Me?’ Paul asked.

‘Not you. Baby.’

‘Why do you worry? He’ll have a good life. Better than mine. Better than yours, for sure.’

‘You don’t know my life to say that,’ Auntie Mei said.

‘I can imagine. You should find someone. This is not a good life for you, going from one house to another and never settling down.’

‘What’s wrong with that? I don’t pay rent. I don’t have to buy my own food.’

‘What’s the point of making money if you don’t spend it?’ Paul said. ‘I’m at least saving money for my future grandchildren.’

‘What I do with my money,’ Auntie Mei said, ‘is none of your business. Now, please pay attention to the road.’

Paul, chastened into a rare silence, drove on, the slowest car on the freeway. Perhaps he’d meant well, but there were plenty of well-meaning men, and she was one of those women who made such men suffer. If Paul wanted to hear stories, she could tell him one or two, and spare him any hope of winning her affection. But where would she start? With the man she had married without any intention of loving and had wished into an early grave, or with the father she had not met because her mother had made his absolute absence a condition of her birth? Or perhaps she should start with her grandmother, who vanished from her own daughter’s cribside one day, only to show up twenty-five years later when her husband was dying from a wasting illness. The disappearance would have made sense had Auntie Mei’s grandfather been a villain, but he had been a kind man, and had raised his daughter alone, clinging to the hope that his wife, having left without a word, would return.