As I left the Dayal house that night for the last time, shutting the door on that strange party, on that strange marriage, on that strange girl who would not speak to me again for nearly a decade, Anjali Dayal appeared diminished. She walked next to me down the driveway, barefoot, and seemed too exhausted by all that had gone wrong to radiate the kind of damning maternal energy my mother would have unleashed on any boy caught in Prachi’s room.

I remembered, suddenly, her dead brother. I scanned her for signs of this early tragedy. Was some part of her always lodged in the past, in the moment when he’d been lost? Would some part of me always remain trapped here, in this moment, in Hammond Creek, too?

“Go home, Neil,” Anjali Auntie said. She didn’t sound like an angry mother—more like my sister, in the urgent tone she took when I was about to say something to get her in trouble with our parents. She glanced toward the Walthams’ curb, where a tall, chestnut-haired white man was stepping out of a hatchback and considering the BUSH/CHENEY lawn sign. He’d double-parked, blocking in one of the Dayals’ guests’ cars. Anjali Auntie seemed to flinch at the sight of him. I assumed she needed to go negotiate for the space. “Please. Your dad must be worried.”

I trudged across the cul-de-sac, looking briefly behind me. Anjali Auntie was walking toward the white man, her mouth open, her hands lifted as though starting an argument.

My father was waiting for me in the breakfast room. He watched me unlacing my shoes, trying to read me. My mother and sister didn’t appear to be home yet. I made for the stairs, but he stopped me on the landing.

“You have been up to something, Neeraj,” he said. I noticed again the shimmer of his bald spot, and I thought of the tender part of a baby’s skull that makes it vulnerable, and had a vision of me holding my father and accidentally dropping him on the crown of his head.

He approached me. “You have been drinking alcohol, isn’t it?” His nose wrinkled.

I nodded. Perhaps it was the wine or perhaps it was honest new wisdom, but I could see everything he did only as a kind of inept performance by a B-grade actor.

“Do you like looking like this? You look like a big mess. You do not look like my son.”

“Yeah. I like it.” I loved it, actually, when he put it like that.

A button of moonlight shone between the clouds. Through the staircase window, I could see the still-bright lights of the Dayals’. I had the mad thought that if I got up to my room, alone, before the buzz wore off, I might find Shruti waiting, prepared to talk with me.

“I wanna go to bed,” I said.

“Have you been doing this regularly, Neeraj?”