“Are you serious?” asked Arman. Sarah thought he might kick the newel. “She’s in a cult?”

“She packed up her purple duffel bag and flew to L.A., and I thought, ‘How great is that? How great is it that she’s taking such good care of herself?’ Remember?” Sarah asked Matthew, with the kind of bitter laughter she hated most about herself.

Without any internal warnings, Sarah suddenly needed to move. She stood, walked quickly down the stairs as if she were rushing somewhere specific. She went into the kitchen, filled a glass with water even though she wasn’t thirsty. When she came into the living room, they were all waiting. “At first, when I heard she was in this group, I thought, ‘Okay,’” she continued, as if there’d been no interruption. “I thought, ‘Sure, fine. So she may be a bit addicted to yoga and she might need to follow some kind of strict health regime,’ but I wasn’t about to start in about how any addiction was an addiction. If we had a yoga-addicted, maybe vegan, maybe-a-little-too-earnest daughter? If she lived a clean and sober life? You would never hear me complain. You’d never hear me make one stupid joke. Never.”

“Of course,” said Kiki. “But how—”

“At the time, when we found out that the group’s headquarters was in Pasadena, I thought, ‘Well, Matthew travels so much for work that it doesn’t really matter where we live,’ so I found a rental in Pasadena. Then I tried, almost every day for weeks, to talk to Leda, but it became very clear that she was discouraged from speaking with us. When I did see her, I tried to say anything I possibly could to get her away. This accomplished nothing except that she distanced herself further. At some point I tried to step back and really understand what she was doing, and when I asked the most basic questions, she responded that the integrity of the group’s intellectual property was so important that in order to protect their trade secrets, which had been, you know, developed at great time and expense, she wasn’t allowed to talk about anything. She actually said—with a completely straight face—that she wasn’t allowed to disclose the group’s proprietary methods and materials. So then Matthew hired a very expensive deprogrammer, who couldn’t even get Leda to talk to him, which led to Matthew not coming back to Pasadena.”

“That’s not true,” Matthew said quietly.

“It is. It is.” Sarah remembered his saying Leda was no longer a child. That she was sober now and it was her life, her choice. She remembered this because she remembered thinking but not saying that maybe he was right. “It is true.”

Matthew continued to shake his head.