She understood that she’d drunk more than she’d planned to, and that she probably shouldn’t drive home. They’d walk the ten, fifteen blocks, whatever it was. Whenever it was time. Which was not yet. No, she wasn’t ready yet. She edged herself closer to the fire and held up her palms, drawing in the warmth and closing her eyes so that she could feel it on her eyelids and maybe rest a while. She let the roar of the ocean close in around her like a blanket. When it had numbed the voices and the music and the crackling of the fire to a dampened drone, it was finally quiet enough for her to remember that she’d prepared a whole damned speech for Nelson on the way to the Greyhound terminal. She had meant to bring up their father’s heart attack that spring, their mother’s paranoia after their neighbors’ house had been burgled while they were sleeping, how her mother had gone so far as to demand a gun for protection, insisting she never felt safe here the way she did in Hong Kong. Mayling had selected some choice words about all these things. But they were not what she hated her brother for.

She hated how her parents had been reduced to a pathetic, funereal longing, how their mantelpiece was still decorated with Nelson’s pictures, though they could hardly bring themselves to talk about him. How every Christmas her father still cooked more than the three of them could manage, and afterwards her mother would wait until Mayling had finished putting her shoes on in the hall, handing her a carefully packed box of leftovers and standing in the doorway as she walked down the drive to her car. She had no idea how long their mother would stand there, staring into the distance with one hand in the air, but catching sight of her in the rearview mirror, she knew her mother was hoping for some sign—an unusual noise or movement disturbing the quiet of their street—that meant that this year, Nelson had decided to come back and surprise them.

Nelson would know none of these things, would never know anything beyond a vague, romantic notion of the true extent of the wounds he had made. And in that moment, enveloped in the roar of the ocean, Mayling decided that it was wrong to tell him. He hadn’t earned it.

When she opened her eyes again, she saw her brother playing guitar to a rapt audience and trying to sing something that sounded like “Tangled Up in Blue” with a duck leg hanging from his mouth, stopping every so often to take a bite out of it. He winked at Mayling, who returned a nod.