“Yujun?” I don’t bother to correct her assumption that he’s mine. “He speaks English.” He had come back from a business trip to Hong Kong. “Maybe Chinese?”

“Oh, probably. And Japanese, too.” Mel nods to herself. “That’s pretty common for high-level execs. The more languages you speak, the better.”

“How about this Kim Jihye? She kind of looks like the picture?” Jules interjects.

Anna turns Jules’s phone screen around and holds the photo of Kim Jihye next to it. In my photo, Jihye is wearing a light-colored skirt with a high waist and a red T-shirt. A long necklace dangles low. Her hair is cut short and she has small circle shades on. The image on Jules’s screen is a mere headshot. The hair is slightly longer, a little like Mel’s chin-length bob. Her red lips are a straight, unsmiling line.

“It’s hard to say because of the sunglasses.” Jules squints at the screen. “How old is your mom?”

“My mother is—my adoptive mother is fifty-five.”

“I think your bio mom would be younger,” muses Jules. “Most women who give up babies are young, right?”

I have never done any demographic research but it’s what I’ve assumed, too. “I don’t know exactly, but it sounds right.”

“This Kim Jihye is forty-four, and that would make her nineteen when she had you.”

“Eighteen, actually,” Jules interjects, flipping her long hair over her shoulder. “You’re born one year old in Korea and then you turn a year old at the New Year, so you’re not actually twenty-five here. You’d be twenty-six. Maybe twenty-seven depending on the date you were born.”

“If she’s twenty-seven, you’d have to call me unnie,” Anna teases. “That’s what younger girls call older girls. Jules is twenty-six here. If you’re older than her, you get to tell her what to do.”

Jules scowls at this. “What year were you born again?”

“Ninety-five. Same as you.” She must’ve forgotten our age discussion at the bar.

“Right! You’re same-age friends. Ninety-five-liners,” Anna crows. “Chingu is the word—”

“For friend,” I finish, feeling like I’m fluent because I know one word.

Jules’s frown makes a reappearance. For some reason, she doesn’t like the idea of being same-age friends.

“Mel and I are your unnies, which is essentially ‘older sister.’ If you were a boy, you’d call us noona.”

“But she’s not a boy and we’re not Korean, so don’t call me chingu. I think this is her.” Jules shoves her screen under my nose. “She’s the right age and if you put sunglasses on her, the shape of the face is the same—oval with a small forehead. You have a small forehead.” Jules lifts my hand and presses it against my head. “See. It’s three fingers, maybe four if you squeeze them together. This woman has a small forehead too. You don’t recognize her?”

I shake my head. “No, but I’ll check her out.”

“What if she doesn’t speak English?” Anna asks. “Do you want one of us to go with you?”