“What about tonight? Right now, you and I both want a drink. Could we just start there?” Dorsey hated the crack in his voice. It sounded like he needed her. The pleading tone in his voice made it sound like he was lonely.

“Okay. Start your interrogation.” Dorsey hoped she could not hear his sigh of relief. He was glad she had spared him the wattage of her smile.

He pulled up the questions on his phone. “First question: How do you feel about your relationship with your mother?”

“No way is that the first question.”

“It’s the first in my app.”

“There’s an app! The precision of your weirdness is . . .” Liza laughed, a high, sweet sound, and kissed the tips of her fingers. His eyes watched her soft mouth.

“Your job is not to critique the question-delivery method,” he said.

“Okay, wow. My relationship with my mother is . . . fraught. There are so many land mines. I could effectively avoid them when I had my own place, but since I got evicted, all I seem to do is set her off.” Liza said the last part facing the window. Something seemed to latch into place for Dorsey. She had been evicted. Liza could not pay rent with the job she had, with a degree—with two degrees. She was personally affected by the lack of affordable housing in her neighborhood.

“Mothers fully understand you when you’re six, then they sometimes forget that they have to keep understanding you,” Dorsey said.

“What about your mom?”

“See, with me, you get a twofer. My relationship with my biological mom is . . . well . . . I think I remind her of a time in her life that she can barely stand to remember. She was treated pretty poorly by my biological father. Now she has a new family and wants nothing to do with me.” Dorsey wanted to sound funny and lighthearted. But his delivery tanked. The truth just wasn’t lighthearted.

After his family’s horrific accident, he’d traveled back to Manila on an ill-fated soul-searching trip to find his mother. It had been so simple that he wondered why he hadn’t done it before. He’d found her by some miraculous happenstance. Some part of him wondered if his mother hadn’t been coerced into the adoption. As much as he loved Patricia, he’d heard so many stories of less-than-legal international adoptions. He’d thought maybe when his mother saw him she’d open her arms and exclaim, My son!