One Sunday evening, he surprised them by returning home not with his usual clanging liquor shopping but a bag from Best Buy. He’d bought them a PlayStation 2 to replace theirs, which had perished in the fire. Mira whooped, Rosemary nodded.

Raymond felt he had failed the older girl yet again.

Rosemary in fact did sense her own alienation. Acutely so. She was culpable for Arik’s act of arson, and her mother’s death, too, by default. Indirectly, but still. Yet here she was, being rewarded. She felt imprisoned by Raymond’s generosity. She didn’t want the fancy restaurant dinners. She didn’t need the cashmere sweaters. She’d gone from one cage to the nicer one next door. Only sex provided her with spiritual relief; only in bed, arching her back and coming hard while a horny senior fucked her, did she truly taste the freedom she craved. Raymond was the opposite of sex. Sure he was lovely in a sad, Miss Havisham kind of way, but how he oppressed her with his expectant, puppy-dog looks. He sought her approval in everything. And why did he have to drink so much? Was it really so difficult being rich and famous? She hated it when his words slurred and his reflexes slowed—and especially the way he spilled food down the front of his shirt after a few glasses of wine. This really, really frightened her; she couldn’t understand how Mira could just sit there and cackle. At least their parents had behaved like parents—their kind of tyranny she could navigate. Raymond, on the other hand, was home all the time, and all the time scrutinizing her, trying to get a bead on her, trying to impress her. She finally grasped the seemingly unreasonable desire of that girl Brittany Ann Yamasato to Shawshank away from her perfect, affluent, well-educated parents and their perfect, affluent, well-educated love. It made sense, running off to the boyfriend’s dorm, where they could fuck until they were sore and forget where they were or what time it was. It’d be like getting her own island. Maybe being forced to live with unloving relatives in Koreatown wouldn’t be so bad—at least they’d leave her alone, plus she’d be in the city and not trapped in the boonies. She was supple, she could absorb disappointment from any direction as long as boys wanted to fuck her.