“It can be about both things, though, is what I thought was interesting. This idea that it’s a story about how women die, but it’s also a story about how women survive.”

Lulu’s dad’s favorite joke is to short-circuit their Passover seders. A seder is supposed to be a long ritual dinner, hours and hours devoted to telling a story everyone already knows. His parents, observant immigrants, used to make him sit through all of it. Lulu’s whole life, he’s sat everyone down at the table and said, “You know how this one goes, right? They tried to kill us; they couldn’t; let’s eat!” and tucked right into his matzoh ball soup.

Bea’s parents left the Philippines decades ago, but their siblings are still there; they don’t work in politics, but her grandparents used to. She doesn’t talk about it much, but she mentions, every now and again, how violent things are over there, under the new president. How glad she is that part of her family is here, and how impossible it is not to worry about the rest of them, who are still there.

If you’re telling the story, it means you’re still alive. If you’re telling the story, it means you’re still haunted by it too.

“Survival is a privilege,” Naomi says. “And it is also kind of a burden.”

“I don’t want it. Either of it. Any of it.”

“What do you want instead?”

Lulu doesn’t have an answer for that.

After a while, Naomi says, “Thank you for telling me.”

“You’re . . . welcome?”

“I know you want to handle it on your own. So I appreciate that you chose to let me help. Or try to.”

Lulu doesn’t know what to say to that. She doesn’t think of herself as being particularly tough, or self-sufficient. She doesn’t think of herself as being someone who doesn’t want help. Only someone who’s trying desperately not to.

“I love you, little sister,” Naomi says.

Lulu’s thought so many times that being hard would break her, that she would crack in half under the pressure. But somehow it’s Naomi’s tenderness that does it, that finally makes her feel like she’s suddenly, totally come undone.

Lulu goes and sits on one of the stone benches in the grove of fruit trees in the backyard. It’s dark out and it has been basically since she got home from school. The dark here isn’t romantic the way it was at The Hotel; she can see the neighbors’ lights, and the ones from her house up the hill. She can hear city noises and see the buzzy ambient hum of urban fluorescence brightening the world around her, making all of it seem mundane and comprehensible. She closes her eyes and it presses harder against her, demanding her attention, insisting on being let in.