I leave the bath when I start to feel faint and pad around the apartment barefoot. It’s as gray and soulless as concrete every time I see it. There is no trace of Mama here, even though she chose this place because she wanted a cozy nook near the institute. The living room is bare except for uncomfortable black leather furniture (the modern kind missing real cushions, backs, and arms), and I gag every time I smell the wood-polish scent. The only two bits of decor—above a fake fireplace I can’t turn on—are a machíkíl cleaver and a dreary Viloki painting of the original settlers playing cards at a tavern. The kitchen cabinets are empty, and the expensive coconut water in the fridge—I glug down two, pink sluicing down my chin—screams Teddy’s assistant was here.

Dad didn’t stay here at all the past few years, but he never sold it. I wonder if he was keeping it for me and Tai, or if he thought Mama might return.

I change into a fresh pair of jeans, clean skin still raw, before hitting the streets alone. The book, don’t forget the book you need to write. I’m late for my afternoon appointment: a meeting scheduled weeks ago at the store Mama took me to once a week as a child—our little secret.

The street is quiet in May, the afternoon light streaming through the tree branches so that the sidewalk looks paved with scales of gold. I walk past finely dressed young women, pale-faced and light-footed, filtering out of the glass palaces of Dior, Chanel, Hermès as they close for the day. This neighborhood is known for its luxury boutiques and upscale tea parlors, where the Viloki mulberry tea is priced like the rarest threads of saffron, even though it tastes the same as everywhere else. Soon, the city will swell with summertime visitors, who buy luxury goods like they’re convenience store trinkets.

But Limatra isn’t homogenous, like other Mediterranean hot spots—because its founders were Norman, Arab, Byzantine-Greek, Lombard, Swabian, Albanian, Aragonese, Jewish. None of the people I pass on the street share Mama’s bronze skin and reddish-brown hair. A hundred unique sets of wrinkled eyes watch me from every row of a passing silver Hero Pharm bus, which transports people from the factory near the airport to stops throughout the city.

The only common characteristic of these faces is their glum, bored expression. Tired and closed off, like the commuters I see on the subway back home.

I wonder if it was like this ten years ago. I wonder what Mama and Dad hoped it would be like today.