Lyall’s emptied garage in the Ponce de Leon Avenue home: bodies knock into beakers. Strange smells, some pungent as fresh ginger, others hot like chili powder. Eerie columns of smoke rise from the vessels. Blue and orange flames irradiate the windowless bunker. Nothing here is as pretty as her lemonade. Often, it’s gloopy, cinnabar red. Another, like souring milk—it comes up from her mouth in foamy vomit; she is rabid. He won’t let her stop. He pushes the vial to her lips, holds her head back, tips it down her throat. “You have to, darling,” he whispers. “You have to.” For the first time, she wonders, as she swallows her bile, if they’ve gone a little mad.

But she’s come to crave these drinks, just as we crave the lemonade. It’s an addiction—to the brews, and to him. She aches for both equally. Once or twice, he wonders aloud if they should slow up. She never allows it.

Lyall and Anjali have had a year together.

But then Pranesh restarts the old fight. Anjali and Anita must move. To California. He plans to put the Hammond Creek house on the market. He needs liquidity for the company, and claims Anita stands a chance at Harvard from the South Bay public schools. He says it wouldn’t matter, anyway, if she got into Harvard and he couldn’t pay. Anjali fights back. Which causes Pranesh to suspect something. He threatens to cut her off. “I have been patient,” he warns her. “Indulgent.”

And then, Shruti.

When I tell Anjali the news, she thinks bitterly: Perhaps this is why we age, placing a hand on my neck. So that someone makes the right decisions. The world seems to be telling her that leaving Hammond Creek, and Lyall, is the adult thing to do. He tries to reason with her, even arrives at the mustard yellow house on the night the Dayals are hosting a party, the very last night I see Anjali Dayal for a decade. I catch a glimpse of him, pulling up by the Walthams’ house. I walk home while they argue in plain sight. He begs her to consider being with him, not to be so trapped in her own culture. She dares him: Would he pay for Harvard? Parent Anita? His silence is all the answer she needs; her daughter is just a story to him.

NEXT TO ME, Anita sniffed. She had been as stony as a practiced meditator as we listened to her mother; her ajji, across the room, was similarly unmoving. I was afraid to look at Anita, for she had never liked anyone witnessing her vulnerability. I reached to hold her small hand in my larger one, gripped it so my muscles clenched and my ears popped.

Anjali Auntie, drawing me out of myself, just as she used to in the Hammond Creek basement: “Do you know why so many alchemists died, Neil?”