After exchanging phone numbers with David, who could help her translate her mother’s documents, Margot paid for her groceries and headed back toward the parking lot where amber floodlights illuminated cars and customers pushing carts. She had only a few hours to clean and prepare for her guests, who would arrive at nine. She rushed toward her car with a sense of levity, a giddiness about the new year and the possibility of living in Los Angeles.

She’d find a new place, a smaller one, maybe a studio in Koreatown or Echo Park, or she could rent a room in a shared house just like her mother when she first moved to America. She’d fly to Seattle to pack up all her belongings and ship what she needed down. But the thrill of starting life over again animated her.

She couldn’t quite see herself transplanting her same behaviors in an office job from one city to the next. She always knew that she wasn’t cut out for it—the hours indoors in front of a screen, the data entry, the filing, the water cooler outside her door—but what else could she do with so little experience, no connections, and an English degree? She’d have to do something fresh, reinvent herself. She could work at a coffee shop or a restaurant or in retail while she went back to school for art.

Margot was struck by the memory of holding the corner of the net out to the sky, up against the shape of the Ferris wheel, imagining all the tiny silver fish—like her mother, shimmering and liquefied—that would swim through its weave.

But she and her mother were now both free yet forever woven into each other. They could be both—separate and inseparable. They were not a rotten net but something more deliberate like threads of color, variations of blue, plaited, one after the other. Her mother’s death was not a knot but a temporary undoing. Her mother had been carrying the burden of so much truth, truths that she had protected Margot from, and now Margot knew: she, like her mother, could handle anything—even love, even family.

ACCELERATING ONTO THE 10 IN A FRIDAY NIGHT SNARL of traffic in the middle of January, she wondered if moving back to LA was, in fact, a terrible idea. She hated driving. She gazed at the sad disco of taillights, with her mother’s ashes in the passenger seat, thinking about Mrs. Baek, wherever she was, driving off to start all over again. What if she hadn’t made it anywhere far? She could hide in this city. It was easy to be anonymous, to find some nook within one of the suburbs, or even in downtown LA, to lie low until the trouble had passed. How would anyone know?

Margot thought about how she could one day run into her, that perhaps driving down the street, she could glance at a car stopped beside her and notice a woman in the driver’s seat and wonder if that was Mrs. Baek.

After a dinner of kimchi fried rice two weeks ago at his apartment in Echo Park, David translated some of the documents from her mother’s safety-deposit box. With the help of the investigator hired by Margot’s father, her mother had determined the identity and location of her parents in Gunpo, a city south of Seoul. Only Mina’s mother, now ninety-two years old, survived. But what was not obvious from the documents was whether or not Mina had ever reached out to her, or whether knowing her mother lived was enough.

“Would you want to meet her?” David had asked.

“I don’t know.” Margot stared at the grain of his wood dining table. The whorls reminded her of thumbprints.

“We can call this investigator, Mr. Cho.” He studied the papers. “Maybe, if not about your grandmother, maybe he has some info on this other family?” His eyes were glossy. “The little girl with the pigtails, if she’s still alive.”

“Oh, God, I don’t know. I’d have to sit with this for a bit first.”

Afterward, she drove home and cried for her mother and father. She cried for her grandmother. Why did this world break so many people apart? Why was it so hard to be together? Would her grandmother be relieved to know what had happened to her daughter, or would she be struck by the kind of grief that could kill her, too? How did we decide how to live without breaking each other?

She wept for days and could hardly eat at all. The following weekend, Miguel delivered groceries and made a dinner of enchiladas for them at the apartment with a red mole sauce that he had purchased from the restaurant they never made it to on Christmas Eve. They sat in silence mostly, which was just what she needed. All the things she felt were terrible and heavy. All the things she felt were different variations of pain.

She had then finally mustered the courage to call Mrs. Kim, who had at first not answered, but returned her call two days later.

Sitting on her mother’s couch in the living room which was now mostly bare except for the most necessary of furniture, Margot asked, “Do you think that maybe . . . Do you know anything about what happened to my father after he left my mom? This would’ve been in the late eighties.”

“We met in Chicago in 1990 or 1991,” Mrs. Kim said, voice scratchy and weak. “He was at that time working at his cousin’s import and export business, and he had bought a small supermarket there eventually. He never really talked about what his life had been like in LA. I figured it was because back in the day, when he was in his twenties, he had a wife who died.”

“Another wife?”

“Yes, that must have been in the early eighties so—before you, before your mom.” She coughed away from the receiver. “He didn’t have his papers. After we married, he got his green card. But he had never told me about your mom or what had happened between the two of them.” She paused. “I’m sorry. I’m afraid I’m not much help.”

“How did you both end up back in LA?” Margot asked.

“My family is in Orange County.”

“I see.” Margot sighed. “Maybe you might be able to . . . tell me more about him? At least how you met? What he was like? I just want to know.”

“Sure . . . okay.” Mrs. Kim paused. “Do you want to meet somewhere in Koreatown? I haven’t been there in years. I’m trying to learn how to drive again, so maybe after I take my lessons. Or I can hire a car.”

“What happened to your driver?” The push at the doorstep. The smell of fresh-cut grass with that undercurrent of something foul—manure or compost. The taste of metal in her mouth.

“I had to get rid of him.”

“Really?”

“Yes, it’s all very unfortunate.” She breathed into the phone. “He was . . . stealing from me. You can never trust a man who looks like that, I guess.” She coughed again. “He was trying to get all these ideas into my head. I found him snooping around my computer, looking through bank accounts and stuff. It’s been . . . I’ve had a really hard time lately.” Her voice broke. “I guess we all have, right? Nothing seems right these days. It’s hard to even get out of bed.”

“Yes. Yes, I understand,” Margot said.

“Maybe you could call the investigator?” Mrs. Kim asked. “I don’t know what you’ve found at your mother’s house. But I bet he could share what he already knows. Maybe that could help you fill in some of what you’re missing. Have you tried asking him? Your father gave him a lot of business. He was very good at his work.”

The next day, Margot called David and asked if he could contact the investigator, who most likely only spoke Korean. The investigator revealed that her mother had been married in her twenties and had a daughter in Korea, who was killed with her father by a car speeding in the road. They had been walking to the grocery store. Her mother had been at home.

Her half sister had only been eight years old. Her mother had only been four when she had lost her parents. These children had been lost to their parents through recklessness and war.

Perhaps, despite the distances between them, the differences in their experiences as a mother and a daughter, as individuals, as women of a certain time and place, what had made them a family was not simply blood but never fully giving up on each other. Forgiveness was always a possibility. One day, you could dive into the dark water and float because of a lightness in your life now that you had taken off your clothes, abandoned all those stones. You were free from every net. You relaxed like you had never been able to before.

She had so much information now. She had so much to create. What would her grandmother want to know? She would be the only audience who mattered at this point.

And now Margot inched the car down the pier, nervous about hitting one of the pedestrians in the crowd that funneled down to the end. The Ferris wheel flashed hot—red and white. She cracked open her windows to the cacophony of voices, of different languages and laughter. The wind seemed to attack her as she climbed out of the car, shivering, zipping her jacket closed.