I typed a sentence into the English box and hit Translate.

I did my best to read what popped up—Aoyb ir gevinen, vos vet ir nutsn di freyz gelt far?—and handed Keya back the phone.

She looked at the screen, then at me. “Plane tickets to England and India, so we can see family and friends whenever we want. You?”

“A Donut Robot.”

“A what?”

“It’s a machine that makes ninety-six dozen doughnuts an hour, so we, my friend Josh and I, can grow our doughnut business.”

“Why doughnuts?” she asked. “That shop you started, The…”

“The Doughnut Stop.”

“Right. I was just curious, what made you want to start a doughnut shop in the first place?”

Before I knew it, I was telling Keya the whole story, how my parents moved us to Petersville, how on the first morning in town I discovered Winnie’s sign in the General Store advertising the chocolate cream doughnuts she didn’t sell anymore, and how I finally got her recipe and then made it my own.

“I didn’t want to move either,” Keya said when I finally finished. “We moved to England from Hyderabad when I was eight. That was hard enough. Then, just when I was really settled, we moved to the States.” She went quiet for a minute. “Do you come back to the city much?”

“A bit. But it’s not the same.”

“It’s weird, right? Like even if you moved back, it would be someplace different. Every time I go back to Hyderabad, I keep trying to make it feel like it did before, but it just doesn’t.”

“I know what you mean,” I said, remembering how I felt that first night in the Airstream sleeping across the street from our old apartment.

“There is one place that still feels the same. My aunt’s house in Leh. Up north. We only ever went for vacations, so going back for vacations now feels just like it did before. And I never spent time with anybody my age there, so it’s not like when we go back to Hyderabad where I see kids who used to be friends but are really kind of strangers now.”

Charlie popped into my head for the first time in months. Charlie, who had been my best friend since the Red Room in preschool. Charlie was a stranger now, a stranger who sent me invitations to birthday parties I knew he hoped I couldn’t come to.

Keya and I were quiet for a while, and I noticed that the display screen wasn’t flashing anymore. It was just black. Unsure whether this was a good sign or a bad one, I decided not to say anything about it.

Keya was tapping away on her phone again. “Es iz nisht a tsufal,” she read slowly, then handed me the phone.

In the English box were the words: It wasn’t an accident. “What wasn’t an accident?”

“I saw her, Chef JJ. She knocked the box of salt. She made you spill it.”