If an electric kettle is destroyed in a fire, and replaced by a kettle that looks nothing like it, and the longtime owner of said kettle does not notice the difference, is it possible, perhaps, that the original kettle was never really destroyed? Or: that it had never existed at all?

When her father came to visit her in Boston, he watched her eyes too carefully: for drink, for drugs, for signs that she had become angry with him again. When he’d divorced her mother, when she was eighteen, she’d been more forgiving than her brother, more willing to hear his side of the story, even if, ultimately, it had not proved particularly sympathy-inducing. She had known then, perhaps, that she was going to need to build up some credits for the psychic damage she was going to cause him with all the drugs. But now that she’d made it—for now—through what he referred to as her “difficulties,” she found herself angry with him at random moments, furious about things he’d said and done more than a decade earlier, but that she hadn’t been stable enough to do anything about at the time. She felt on some level that this wasn’t fair of her. But she was also pretty sure that her father caught a lucky break in her having been too fucked-up to confront him when he most deserved it. Usually now she felt a combination of tenderness and frustration toward him, which seemed like the appropriate things for a daughter to feel toward her sixty-year-old father.

She’d taken him to dinner at a restaurant down the road from her apartment, a brilliant, dark little cavern operated by overgrown children who loved to put marrow and smoke into everything they made. Her father, with a sprightly multitude of tiny ingenious dishes to choose from, thought the burger sounded good. She ordered five things, to demonstrate how one should behave in this restaurant, and the burger as well, to appease him. He was wary of being tricked, she thought, by her and by the young people running in and out of the open kitchen. She trusted the food here. Whatever they did—soaked everything in fat? spiked the water with MDMA?—the dishes came out tasting soft and wonderful, like the baby food of the future.

“I just want you to be happy,” her father said.