“I haven’t seen Laird in four years. He wanted little to do with me after I left his mother, and after she died, well . . . He never cared for Crystal. I think I embarrassed him.” He looked out across the lawn and I tracked his gaze. A houseboy was dragging a bucket of water along a flowerbed, watering the plants with a repurposed can. “I have a hard time believing that this is happening to Laird because he isn’t a person that things happen to. He’s a person who makes things happen. He’s always in charge. He controlled all his friends, his mother. He was always at the top of his class. Even when he was little, he was very organized. He’d lay out his clothes each night before school. And we didn’t have a lot of money to get nice things, but he managed. He never looked untidy. He’s not the kind of guy to do something stupid like get kidnapped.” Mr. Bontotot’s eyes were open with disbelief. “He has a master’s in political science from Berkeley.”

The security guard had emerged from the guardhouse, his shirt hiked up, and he stood in the sun scratching his belly, yawning.

“So who did Laird get his brains from?”

“His brains? That’s me. His mother was a good person, but she was all hard work and prayers. Me, I like to read.” He turned to look at me, as if I might challenge him. But I saw no reason to.

When we reentered the house, my tita Rosa was showing Crystal a photo album, pictures of the siblings in the fifties, black-and-white relics of my titas and titos leaning on swanky cars or picnicking together. She must have been getting desperate for ways of entertaining her guests. I was relieved by my phone’s pinging with a text from Chet, who had been threatening to make an appearance for hours, something that I’d hoped would not happen because we didn’t need another person in the mix, but that I now recognized as my escape. I texted back that I would meet him outside.

“You have to excuse me,” I said. My aunt looked up from the album with a disapproving frown. “I have to meet a friend.”

I sat next to Chet as he backed down the drive at high speed, looking past Top Gun, who, as usual, was sitting in the center of the back seat. “I thought you didn’t want to come to Makati today. You said you had to be with your family.”

“I changed my mind. There’s only so much of this stuff you can take. There’s nothing happening, which is anxiety provoking, but it’s hard to think of news that would make it better.”

“Laird is—” Chet stopped himself and shook his head.

“What?” I waited for Chet to respond.

“I feel bad for his parents,” he said.