I flipped to another section about a movie she and Dad had watched. Pretty good. Not my favorite but Lou liked it. Think he just liked the young girl detective. There was no poetry or hot teenage romance as far as I could see—just pages upon pages of a discussion she and Dad were having about remodeling the kitchen. I put the journal on the floor, picked up another one, and began reading about a new type of potpourri Mom liked. I put the journal down and picked up another, then another. There were no Italian lovers, no runaway horses, no midnight kisses. The most sexy it got was a single line: Lou and I had sex tonight. Otherwise it was just Mom, sounding like Mom: a nice woman who was overworked by the daily tasks of raising us and exhausted by it all.

I dug through the chest for an older-looking journal and saw, buried near the bottom, a picture of a woman in a see-through negligée next to a table with two empty wineglasses. I put the journal down and reached for the book. Chianti Dreams, the title of the paperback read. Behind the wineglasses, the setting sun illuminated a perfect silhouette of a curly-haired Italian man with his shirt open. I turned the book over. It was supposed to be a summer college trip, but after she meets Antonio, Suzette’s life will never be the same. Ravenous for love and adventure, Suzette finds the kind of love that will soon be forbidden.

“What the fuck?” I said aloud. I skimmed the pages, and found Suzette, a woman who lay in beds with Italian men in the turquoise light of morning, and crossed her legs seductively while smoking cigarettes. I dug through the chest and found another thick gaudy paperback, the kind one might find in the magazine aisle of Meijer’s. South of the Border. A shirtless ranchero stood illuminated by lightning, his pecs streaked with rain as he held on to a dark-haired woman.

The door opened from above.

“Babe, you coming up? It’s almost midnight.”

I heard the kids squealing upstairs and Nin in the kitchen asking where the champagne was. I laid the paperback down atop the journal and shut my eyes, imagining the scanner-bots in some distant warehouse committing every item of Nin’s rushed packing to holographic memory.

Upstairs, Nin had placed a bunch of wineglasses and the unopened champagne bottle by the edge of the coffee table while she talked to her holographic boyfriend. “I’ll totally toast with you! We’re about to open the champagne!” she told no one in the room.

“Hey, babe,” Theo said, and gave me a kiss. “My sister’s streaming from Oakland.” He gestured to the empty space at his side. “Want to blink her in and say hi?”

But I didn’t want to see any more holograms. “Just say hello from me,” I told him.