“Did you know Mr. van der Holt well?”

“Turns out, not really.”

That night, Raymond treated himself and the girls to dinner in Manhattan. Hail and sleet meant that even without calling ahead, they landed a table at a jewel box tapas spot in the West Village that he’d read great things about.

“We’re all orphans now.” He clasped their hands tightly. “We have to be kind to ourselves.”

That night, they feasted on tripe salad, steamed cockles, grilled skate and hare. Hard snow pellets blew down outside the windows. The girls stared out, rapt; neither had been in a snowstorm. He savored the moment. New York’s still got it. The skyline has been altered but it was still a place you could take out-of-towners and have them wowed.

After dinner, he dropped the girls back at their hotel and went on his own to see Lena Ozova, who’d had a stroke. Her Murray Hill penthouse was everything he recalled from old soirees to celebrate writers she loved more than him—book-lined, silk-carpeted, pockmarked with cheesy little Hogarth engravings. But the old witch, alas, was not the same. Suddenly quite feeble, she moved around in a wheelchair, her musical snarl reduced to a rasp. He had a lousy feeling that the live-in help, a sulky young woman from the Ukraine, wasn’t as kind to her as she was paid to be; she sat in the room the whole time, looking aggressively bored. The Ukrainian ran the house how she saw fit, heating it up like a Soviet sauna and filling the air with the acid tang of artificial pine. Raymond gulped down the glass of lukewarm water she handed to him and said goodbye to Lena sooner than he wished, or expected to. He left knowing he’d never see his old friend alive again, shamed that he’d let himself be intimidated by an unpleasant maid.

On the plane back to Los Angeles, Raymond at last cracked a Xanax smile. This didn’t go unnoticed by his hawk-eyed favorite.

“What? Tell me,” Mira said, looking up from his novel Black Grave.

“I never thought I’d be friends with anyone born in the eighties.”

“But you’re not. We were born in the nineties.”

“Ah. So I was right after all.”

When they got home—another surprise. A thick envelope arrived from a Koreatown lawyer. Mr. Park’s relatives had decided to claim the girls after all, and they would go to court for their property. It was abundantly clear this was more about real estate than blood. Mira ran up to her room in tears. Rosemary went to the den with a stoical stillness and began watching a documentary about meerkats.

“It’ll be all right,” Raymond assured his older girl. “We’ve got a Hollywood divorce lawyer.”