He frowned, and that irritation he’d been feeling toward Luciana for a while came bubbling back up. He’d wondered what the hell her problem was, why they were watching her niece shake an alienand beg for him to talk to her, to get up, to wake up, like she was an animal and not a human being who desperately needed support, and whose family was turning a blind eye to her suffering.

He decided to give her the benefit of the doubt. Maybe there was another side to this. “Why . . . don’t you guys talk anymore?”

“We talk,” she said, too quickly.

“Not like you used to, she told me.”

“Nils . . . doing what he did,” she said, her eyes sliding down to the ground. “Cutting ties with all of us, dedicating his life to The Broken Seal at all costs, destroyed . . . so much of our lives. Meant Demi and the kids had to depend on my mom, and now that she’s in mid-stage dementia, she doesn’t have any compunction about the fact that she blames me and Demi, but mostly Demi, for Nils leaving since Nils is incapable of doing wrong by virtue of that Y chromosome. But then the Fremda Memo happened and I got implicated, and last year was just . . . a series of dominoes falling.”

“What do you mean, ‘implicated’?”

“I told Cora I didn’t have anything to do with the Fremda Memo, because I didn’t. I don’t know how Nils found out about my connection to it. And I told Cora that, and she didn’t believe me. And after that, what fragile trust we had was shattered. And it’s been lying on the floor like so many broken pieces of windowpane ever since.”

Kaveh leaned his head forward until she was forced to catch his eye. “But . . . you did tell Nils about the Fremda group.”

She whipped her head to him, suddenly livid. “No, I didn’t.”

“Yes, you did,” he said, trying not to provoke a fight. “Do you not remember when we first met?”

She looked at him like his hair had turned into snakes.

“It was back in 2002,” he said. “Nils was in town visiting your mother with Cora and Felix and Olive, and you and me and Nils and a few of his other colleagues went out drinking in Culver City. Do you not remember that?”

Her expression of shock and disgust was transforming into one of dread. “I remember that night, yes, but I don’t know what you’re talking about.”