“Tita Rosa,” I said, to catch her before she nodded off. “Do you have Wi-Fi?” She didn’t but happily informed me that from the third floor, I could pick up the Wi-Fi signal from Cousin Baby’s apartment, currently rented to a Dutch embassy worker, which was in the new high-rise across the road. The signal carried, and although it was no good for streaming movies, it was functional for email.

When I returned to my room, Beng was neatly folding my underwear into little squares and color coding it in a drawer of the great cabinet, which was otherwise filled with clothes of long-grown children and babies. Beng closed the drawer with a careful reverence. My pink fake-fur coat, which had taken up half the room in my suitcase, was sprawled across the bed like an improbably hued dead animal. The coat had no purpose in the Philippines, but I had forgotten it hanging on the coat stand in the hallway when packing to leave New York. My other things had already been boxed and sent to storage. I could have left it, but the coat—ridiculously expensive and too young for me—had been an extravagant birthday gift bought by my husband as he tried to convince me to stay, even as the finer details of the last six months had been exposed. If I had left it there for him to find, it would have made a statement that did not express how I felt. Beng picked the coat up and stroked it like a cat. “Ang ganda namaan nito.” She thought it was pretty.

I said, “Try it on.”

Beng slid into the fur, which reached her ankles. Her hands were hidden by the sleeves. Smiling, she went to the mirror.

“Very nice,” I said. “When you get too hot, just hang it in the closet.”

III

III

I spent the next few days recovering from jet lag, comforted by its lack of focus. I didn’t know how long I would be in Manila. I might stay until my money ran out, but as I wasn’t paying for rent and I was living in an economy where it was not unusual to make 150 dollars a month, the money would stretch.