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?”

I shook my head—I didn’t seem to know anything at all, in that moment—but then a phrase returned to me, from a college history-of-science class. Mad as a hatter.

“Mercury poisoning is often incurable and often deadly,” she said in a terrible monotone. “And it’s a key ingredient in most alchemical rituals. You end up ingesting fumes. We drank it, too. A lot of it. I thought I’d found some methods the rasasiddhis—the Hindu alchemists—never knew in order to make it safe.” She scoffed. “Lyall believed me. That, or he was too hooked to object. The trouble is that it’s hard to tell when mercury starts affecting you. The symptoms can seem like something else. Depression, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s.” Her hand—her shaky hand—clutched her kneecap. “Your kidneys fail. A lot fails after that.”

“Why couldn’t you have drunk all the gold we were taking?” I burst.

“So much,” Anita whispered. “There was so much, Mama.”

Anjali Auntie shook her head, a professorial reprimand. We knew better. “Alchemy is bigger than that. We didn’t want to steal someone else’s ambitions. That’s petty, small-time. We were trying to steal from the universe, you could say. Steal time itself.”

Lakshmi Joshi stood, tracing the basin with her finger. Her eyes bore into that lumpy smelted metal. More than ever now, she seemed deaf to what we had just listened to; she was pacing some other plane, a plane where it was not too late.