Why hadn’t Umma’s happiness mattered more to her at the time? Her mother had left out stacks of Korean bridal magazines, eager for Phoebe to have the beautiful wedding she’d wanted for herself. She’d even taken her daughter aside one night and shown her the secret passbook Apa didn’t know about. Twenty-five thousand dollars. It was everything Umma had saved in America, and Phoebe could have it—for the wedding, for her dress. Phoebe had covered her mouth to muzzle her own surprise. Twenty-five thousand dollars! She couldn’t accept it, not with the beauty supply next door going out of business. Umma and Apa had their eyes on it. If they took over that space and expanded, they could hold off the leviathan, H Mart. They could stay in Festival Plaza as an anchor tenant; otherwise their days there were numbered. Phoebe had handed the passbook back to her mother and told her to keep it for the store.

The wedding dress would have been a small consolation to offer Umma. Why couldn’t Phoebe have given that to her?

She called Umma now. Phoebe wanted courage—or maybe she was stalling, or maybe she was simply a grief-stricken daughter. The shape of her anguish over her mother’s illness was something she was too afraid to map, but she was beginning to realize that it was always operating on her. There was no decision it did not color, no part of her life it did not alter.

Apa picked up. Phoebe knew he was sitting next to Umma in the infusion room, and from the sound of it, he’d been dozing.