“It’s supposed to be magical.”

“Could I—could I get your number?” Margot asked. “Maybe when things settle down, we can talk again, before you go to Machu Picchu. I’d love to learn more about him. I know that it brings up a lot, but there are still so many things I don’t know, like what he was doing all those years after he left Koreatown, why he left my mother in the first place.”

“To be honest, there are so many things that I don’t even know about before we—before we were married. Sungmin, give her my number, okay?”

The driver, Sungmin, nodded.

“Thank you for visiting. What was your name again?”

“Margot Lee.” She stood.

“Thank you. What a lovely name,” she said. “Sungmin will walk you out.” Mrs. Kim left the room, rubbing her temples.

Following Sungmin to the entryway and lacing on her sneakers again, Margot pulled out her phone for him to enter Mrs. Kim’s information. After he opened the door, on an impulse, Margot asked, “Do you happen to know anything about my father? When did you start working for him?”

Sungmin shook his head. “Please leave.” He tried to smile politely. “We have a lot to get done today.”

With his hand, he gestured like an usher toward the exit.

Margot stood at the doorway, facing the driveway into the honey-colored morning light. She felt a hand on her shoulder and then a small shove.

She gasped and looked back at him as the door shut. He had touched her. It had all happened so quickly she didn’t even have time to react. The tiered stone fountain gushed water indefinitely. She smelled the fresh-cut grass and the undercurrent of something foul like manure or compost in the air.

He had pushed her. Not hard but in a way that still alarmed her with its abruptness, a hand out of nowhere. And she could still taste the tea, that metallic taste in her mouth.

The Virgin Mary’s face was half-smashed, revealing the creamy bone color inside. Her single dreamy eye and delicate mouth, pert and peach-colored, appeared unbothered. Beneath the drape and the folds of her sky blue cape bordered by gold, her arms stretched forward. A bare set of toes peeked out the bottom of her diaphanous white dress, like that of a Greek goddess, on top of a serpent flicking a tongue.

Margot had been in bed for the past two days sick—dizzy, sore, and tired, immobilized yet frustrated by how much she still had left to do. She now sat on the living room couch, exhausted, contemplating the Virgin Mary in her hand. Margot recalled how upset Mrs. Kim had been about her husband spending so much money on the investigation of her mother’s family. If she called Mrs. Kim, would she provide her with the investigator’s number so that she could figure out what kind of information he had found? Would she know enough Korean to speak with him?

And the push, that final push on the doorstep by the driver? Why had he done that? Was it a warning? The green tea had tasted a bit metallic in her mouth. Poison seemed too far-fetched—plus she was still alive—but the timing was odd. Was this all about money? Was Mrs. Kim out for revenge?

Should she call the police, Officer Choi again? But he had said that he didn’t think they should be contacting Mrs. Kim. And his hands were tied. He couldn’t get further involved: I don’t really see what else I can do here, Margot. As far as your mother’s death goes—which was terrible, I’m sorry—it’s an open-and-shut case. It was an accident.

As she turned the statue in her hands, Margot inhaled through both the sadness and a grave feeling of responsibility since she had found her mother’s body two weeks ago. It was as if she was living for both of them now—thoughts spinning, heart racing wildly—but what if she never found any answers?

Her phone rang. “How are you feeling?” Miguel asked when she picked up.

“Better. Not dead.”

“You’ve been working pretty hard over there. Visiting Mrs. Baek, visiting Mrs. Kim. Maybe you should relax a little.”

“I guess now that I’m sick, I kind of have to.”

“Could I get you something? I could drive over later tonight?”

“No, no, thanks. If I don’t feel better by tomorrow, I’ll find a doctor. I’ll be fine.”

After hanging up the phone, she went into her room, retrieved one of her old unused notebooks from her desk drawer, and sketched the broken Mary—fragments of her face, her toes, the serpent’s tongue at her feet. Her pencil pressed onto paper the big blue eye, thin round brow, the perfect Cupid’s bow mouth.

It had been years since Margot had been compelled to draw. Despite her lack of technical skill, she had a way of juxtaposing images unexpectedly. She always suspected she might have a knack for something more three-dimensional, something akin to mixed media or assemblage, which required more space and would be difficult to describe. The point was that it would tell its own story, invent its own dimension and time. But all of this sounded so high-minded and ridiculous for a woman like her to pursue, a woman who had grown up poor, who had been surrounded most of her life by people struggling to keep the lights on and food on the table.

Yet, everyone needed art. Why else did her mother assign so much care into the fruit that she sliced, that long peel of skin, a ribbon that revealed the tenderness of the flesh inside? Or the tiny flick of her eyeliner that she angled perfectly in the mirror, the arrangement of the outfits that she hung on the walls of her store. Her mother, who was in another life a clothing designer, had sometimes caught Margot drawing. Once when Margot was in the sixth grade, still young enough to not understand how distant her own tiny family had been from ideal, she had been sketching a portrait of her mother’s face—the high cheekbones, the narrow chin, the soft brown eyes that shone as if on the verge of tears, water lapping at a lake’s edge.

“Let me see.” Her mother grabbed the drawing. Squinting, she held it to the yellow light above the dining table. “Am I this old already?”

Margot didn’t have a response. Her mother was the most beautiful person in the world.

It became difficult for Margot to understand what to create. As a child, she hated to upset her mother. Instead she stuck to close-ups of flowers or trees—evergreen in winter or deciduous and mustard yellow and blood orange in the fall—pastoral landscapes that she copied out of wall calendars, which bored her, but what else could she do? She hated to draw her own face—a face she couldn’t quite recognize in her mother or anywhere else on TV or in the movies—the face of a stranger, a foreigner, anonymous and plain.

Later as a teenager, abstract sculpture like that of Ruth Asawa and Lee Bontecou, assemblage, and installation had captured her imagination. She would have the urge to topple trashcans over, scour for materials, but how could she explain this to her mother? And where would she store all her projects? Their apartment was too small. Of course, she’d have to run from this place.

But after she had finally left for Seattle, after college, her student debt had grown and she settled into a desk job, the first one she could find that also might benefit society. At the nonprofit, all of the clients and many of her coworkers were blind or had low vision and navigated the world in ways that startled her—a white cane and GPS, Braille watches, software that read screens out loud.

The first year or so had been almost inspirational, a marvel, but quickly her administrative tasks had become insurmountable piles, deadening levels of repetition on her desk. Her life smelled of printer toner, sounded like the gulp of the water cooler, the beep and whir of the copy machine. Of course, after three years of this, her relationship last year with Jonathan, a coworker, had been thrilling—the warm animal breath, the pulse, the tiny hairs on her arms rising. She needed danger. The thrill of sex drowned out her burning questions, replaced the real dangers that, when pursued, might actually kill her. Who was she? What would happen if she were unafraid of herself?

Margot had always guarded the different parts of her life from each other—her mother, her friends, past boyfriends, coworkers. If none of those things touched, if she could keep them in isolation, she could never be hurt or destroyed entirely. The constant yet quiet construction of separate rooms, compartments around her. But most of the time, she felt alone in the center of that building. Lightless and airtight.

Her mother’s death had burned that structure of Margot’s life to the ground.