"But you didn't tell me about you."

"I guess I just thought that you assumed."

"That you had a trust fund?"

"Well, yeah."

"What did you mean by accounts, plural?"

"I had a career, Leo. Have. I have a career. I did well."

"I knew that. I guess I just didn't think about the money part-"

"How did you think I bought the house?"

"It's upstate New York. I just figured that a down payment out here was like rent in New York."

"I don't have a mortgage."

"Whoa." That was Graham again. "Okay, that's probably like the most baller thing you can say as an adult. From now on, my goal in life is going to be to say that someday. Mortgage? I don't got no fucking mortgage!"

Saina laughed and turned back to Leo. "Are you mad?"

His hands returned finally, one spanning her waist, the other back on her arm. She felt instantly warmed and leaned against him. This was what she'd missed, what had made her seek out Leo as soon as Grayson had packed up his pile of T-shirts: Their shared physical shorthand, the way they responded perfectly to each other's bodily cues so that they knew when to entwine and when to separate without a word of discussion.

"No, Saina. No." He kissed her, inhaling slowly as his lips pressed against her cheek. "I'm just surprised. And I like us to tell each other things."

Saina turned to face him, pressing her body against his. "I know, but this was a hard thing to tell. I guess, in a way, it's easier to say it to you now that the money's all gone." Gone. The word echoed in her head and she repeated it. "Gone." It echoed again, making her feel hollow inside, her brain tumbling down her throat and pounding against her heart, as if the money were the only thing that had filled her up and kept everything in its proper place.

"Hey, you don't know that, right? You said might."

"It's just . . . nothing's worth as much anymore, but the loan is still for the same amount, you know? So they're going to sell off the house where I grew up and pretty much everything in it, and all of the factories and stock, but I don't think that will cover the original loan, and that's when the bank will go after what I have. Not this house, I don't think, because the title's under my name, but everything that's still tied to my dad in name, probably." She leaned closer to Leo, pressing her forehead into his chest.

"What's your dad going to do?"

"Oh god. He has this crazy plan where he thinks that he's going to roll up to the old village in China and somehow be able to reclaim the land that his father lost."

"Wait," said Graham, "are you a princess or something? Or, like, the Last Empress? Who just has land to reclaim?"

"And what would he do with it?" asked Leo.

"Become a farmer? You can give him tips. I don't know. I don't think he's thought that far. To be honest, I think he's lost his mind a little bit." She paused, picturing them. Generations of Wangs that had things, and then three that lost things. "It's just old family land. I don't even know if it's real. He says it is, but he's never even been back to China."

"Why not?"

Why not? Saina wasn't really sure. When he was living in Taiwan, travel between the two places was restricted, but America had lifted its ban before he'd immigrated. "He probably didn't want to go unless he could own the whole country."

"But he's coming here now?" asked Graham.

"Yep. Plus my stepmother and my brother and sister. They stopped off at my uncle Nash's house in New Orleans, but I think they'll be here the day after tomorrow."

Graham nudged Leo. "Ready to meet the in-laws?"

Leo looked at her. "Are they ready to meet me?"

"I think so. They'll just be glad that you're not, well, that you're not Grayson."

"See," said Graham, "one step up already!"

Saina looked at them and for a moment she was bitterly, intensely jealous. Life was so weightless for some people. She wanted to call her father right now and tell him not to come. Just wash her hands of the Wangs altogether, never mind that family was family and she should be glad that she was going to give hers a home. A homeland.

Should she even tell her father about this latest setback? He was probably counting on her reserves to finance the pursuit of the land in China, but what was that going to get them? Leo was right, what could her citified father possibly do with it? Even if he got it, which seemed impossible, it would probably be farmland out in the middle of nowhere. Saina tried to picture him out there, far from the modern towers of Beijing or Shanghai, demanding that some poor peasant boy make his cappuccino bone-dry, asking villagers if there was a better restaurant in town, realizing that he couldn't gossip about the man next to him in Chinese-which sometimes seemed to be his and Barbra's sole pastime-because everyone around him would be Chinese.

Her father, sweating through a custom-tailored suit, armed with a bespoke hoe, trying to raise ghosts on that long-lost land.

The price of a single plane ticket to China could probably buy a few acres out here in Helios, thought Saina, looking out at the empty fields behind the restaurant. "At some point every old family's home had to be a new home."

Graham shook his head. "My family's never had an old home. Sharecropper's cabins to boarding houses to rented rooms to me, here, living the dream. And look at Leo-just a little orphan boy."

Saina smiled at them vaguely. How many generations would it take the Wangs to feel like upstate New York was their ancestral seat? One generation? Maybe two at the most? Saina thought about how a child, a son or daughter of hers, might romanticize their upbringing, spinning a narrative out of the way their people started out in the Old East and continued here in the New.

Who were the Native Americans, really, but a band of Chinese people who had set their sights east and walked for millennia?

Opelika, AL.

2,493 Miles.

AMERICA WASN'T DONE with Charles Wang. He gave her his best ideas and basest impulses-the most vital parts of a man-and in return she snatched away his son. Andrew didn't leave; he was stolen. By a smug porcelain statue with an inkwell for a heart who only wanted to feed off of his youth and beauty. Charles cursed every tenth of a mile that ticked over on the odometer, each click placing another impassable length between the remaining Wangs and their only son.

No. His only son. And only his son. Without May Lee in the world, Andrew belonged only to him. Barbra had no grounds to lay any claim. Charles's own parents were dead, dropping away, one after the other, soon after he arrived in America. All that remained of them was the shard of bone in his suitcase. May Lee's father was long gone but her forgetful mother still languished in some San Gabriel Valley nursing home that would not be receiving any more monthly checks signed by Charles Wang. May Lee's worthless, passive siblings would have to figure out a way to pay for it now.

What was the point of having children? All they did was leave you. He'd left his parents. May Lee had tossed money at hers and fled. Barbra had slipped away from hers without even telling them that she was going. At the very moment when children might emerge from the uselessness of adolescence and finally take on some of the burden of being alive, that was when they blithely severed themselves at the root with one cruel, unthinking cut. Little assholes.

He left too soon. He left and let that woman have his son. Of all the things that he had lost, this was the very worst.

The air-conditioning broke down somewhere between Biloxi and Mobile. There was a smell, like every frozen thing in the world had just died, and then nothing. No matter how many times they toggled the air on and off, nothing stirred in the bowels of the car.

Despite the heat, Barbra kept her window closed, the scarf still wedged between the glass and the frame. She might choose to melt rather than sacrifice the pallor that she thought was aristocratic, but he and Grace had rolled down the rest of the windows.

By the time he pulled into Opelika, all three of them were sweating, shirts soaked through. A quartet of Obama posters-the one that looked like a piece of Communist propaganda-peeled in the window of a boutique while a McCain poster was taped to the door of a neighboring furnace-supply store. This place looked like the model for Main Street, U.S.A., each store an orderly two stories with shingled facades and colored awnings. As he slowed to the town's speed limit, Charles flipped through the radio dial until he landed on a talk station.

A nasal twang rang through the speakers. "Well, there are people in my town, I'm not saying who they are, but they know who they are, and I'm not saying I'm one of them, not that I'd say it if I were one of them, but sure, there are people here who wouldn't vote for a man because of his skin color, sure. Not me, I treat every man the same, white, black, or purple, but there's a lot of narrow minds."

And then the interviewer. "A Gallup poll of Alabama residents shows that most respondents would consider voting for a black president but didn't think that others in their state would do the same."

Grace's head popped up between the front seats. "I have to pee."

The first words from her mouth since they'd left New Orleans without Andrew. Charles patted his daughter's head.

"I think we almost there, okay? You go at the store."

"How do you even know that they'll be there?" she asked.

He didn't. And, if he was being honest with himself, he wasn't even sure that they'd be able to pay him immediately, and he wasn't quite sure what to do if they couldn't.

"No worrying, Gracie. Ren je, hao?"

Ignoring her harrumphs of protest, Charles turned up the sound.

"And now we turn it over to Money Mike who's in Auburn where the Tigers are getting ready to take on the LSU Tigers this weekend. Mike, who will win the battle of the big cats?"

Grace's arm appeared to the left of his head, pointing. "There! It's there! I can't wait for you to park-just let me out!" He slowed the car down and his daughter jumped out the back, slamming the door with so much force that the whole rig shuddered.

"We meet at the store, Gracie!" he shouted out the window, but she didn't turn back or respond.

Parking in Opelika was easy. The streets were half empty and Charles felt a sense of accomplishment as he pulled the wagon, shocks creaking, into place along the curb, cutting the wheel at exactly the right moment so that the U-Haul in back would line up easily. It took only a few long, focused minutes now, instead of the cursing, sweating, quarter of an hour that docking the giant metal fishtail used to take.

He turned to Barbra. "Will you come in?"

She shook her head.

Charles was glad. It seemed less pathetic, somehow, if they just saw him and Grace. He could pretend that they were in the middle of a carefree, father-daughter cross-country jaunt and had decided on a whim to make a personal delivery. There. Life wasn't so bad after all. Smooth down the shirt. Fix the collar. Adjust the pants. Tidy the hair. Too bad men couldn't wear makeup-he could probably use a little lip gloss and rouge, a touch of blue liner to make the whites of his eyes whiter.

Half a minute later Charles was pushing open the weathered wood door of the Magnolia General Store. He could see Grace inside, talking to Ellie Yates, who still looked exactly as he'd remembered her from the plane-tiny and golden.

"Yes. Totally. That's what I want to do." Grace nodded at Ellie enthusiastically as the two of them looked at something on the computer.

For a minute, Charles wanted to turn around and leave. Dump the trailer full of lotions and balms into a river somewhere so that he wouldn't have to break in on Grace's small happy moment. But there was no land in China without the money to find it and, most likely, to bribe some corrupt Communist official into handing it over, so he pressed forward.

"I have a special delivery!"

Ellie turned. "Mr. Wang!" As he crossed the room to embrace her, he noticed Grace clicking something shut on the screen.

"Mr. Wang, your daughter here was just showing me her style blog-she's got herself some serious taste."

Grace smiled.

"Ah, I think you have serious taste," said Charles, looking around the shop. It was expertly done, at once the kind of general store that might have existed in an old American mill town a hundred years ago and a modern art gallery. Every gardening implement looked like a finely wrought weapon, the jars of penny candy were piles of gems, the few articles of clothing equally appropriate for a field hand or a gallery owner. "Everything is even better than you describe!"

Ellie beamed; Charles beamed back. Grace, caught up in the goodwill, opened her blog back up. "Here, Dad, do you want to see it?"

Charles nodded. This was a rare gift, he knew. Grace made space for him in front of the screen and handed him the mouse. He peered down. At first glance, it appeared to be a web page made entirely of pictures of Grace in different outfits. Subsequent glances confirmed it. Grace in her dorm room. Grace lying on a bench. Grace in the woods. Grace in an empty swimming pool. Even though she was all covered up, it felt vaguely pornographic. The whole thing made Charles uncomfortable. His daughter and Ellie were chatting, something about shooting a picture here at the store, but he could feel Grace watching him.

"Very pretty pictures," he said, finally. "Very creative. Nice name, Style and Grace."

"Don't lie. Just say you hate it."

"No, no, no! I don't hate anything you do! Daddy just don't understand blog-it is new thing for me!"

"Well, look." She reached over and typed "makeup" into the search bar. "I did a tutorial with, you know, your stuff."

Charles watched, surprised, as a photo of the Failure's whole line slowly revealed itself on the screen. It was a lovely shot. As good as, or better than, the professional product shots they'd used. He scrolled through the post. There was Grace, putting on the eyeliner that was fine and true, swiping on the richly hued lipstick, atop a caption that read, "OMG Loves It!" Charles wanted to cry. Instead, he patted her hand, and said, "Good girl, Gracie," and then turned to Ellie. "Speaking of makeup, we have special delivery!"

Grace rolled her eyes. "Dad, you made that joke already!"

But she came outside with Charles and Ellie, and smiled as Ellie exclaimed over the pile of boxes stacked in the U-Haul.

"We bring these all the way from California for you-I tell Gracie that the personal is the most important for business."

"Well, I just think that is so sweet, I really do. Trip is going to flip when he sees all this-he built a special shelf and rigged up lighting and everything." Ellie tore into a box right there on the street, using her keys to rip apart the packing tape and scattering the Styrofoam shells out onto the street. Inside, row upon gleaming row of boxes made of the palest, blush-colored paper stock, MAGNOLIA GENERAL STORE printed in gold using a typeface that Ellie herself had designed. She pulled one out reverently.

"I can't believe we did it. Mr. Wang-"

He broke in. "No, no Mr. Wang, please call me Charles."

She smiled. "Charles, we never would have thought this big if it hadn't been for you. Thank you." She held the box up to her nose. "Oh it smells good!"

His heart swelled. It was his factory and his ingenuity, his powers of persuasion, that allowed this southern girl to dream of more than a lovely store in a dying town.

And then they all saw it. Oil had soaked through the bottom of the box, mottling its perfect blush. "Uh oh," said Ellie, joking, nervous. She opened it up and pulled out a glass jar of bath scrub. The label was beautiful. The crystals twinkled in the sun. And the whole thing was covered with a slick, sick sheen. Ellie wiped her hand on the leg of her jeans and looked up at him.

America was ruining everything. Ruining it with her embarrassing heat, with the sticky swelter between her fat white legs. They opened box after box, and each one was the same-a brief, optimistic moment when the contents shimmered in neat, packaged rows, and then the inevitable crash of disappointment as the leaky interiors made themselves known.

The old-towel smell of his own sweat mixed with the sweet magnolia perfume made Charles nauseous. His heart hammered inside his chest with an alarming insistence. It would be incredibly embarrassing to die right now; Grace would never forgive him for it. His head buzzed. He couldn't look at Ellie. With each failed box, the numbers ticked higher in his mind, the tally of money he'd never be able to claim.

"I'm so sorry," said Charles, finally.

The two of them sat on the back of the U-Haul surrounded by a spent pile of cardboard. Styrofoam peanuts swirled along the street. Grace had retreated to the backseat of the car with an excuse about the sun.

"Of course I will refund your deposit."

She nodded. Of course. She would expect nothing less from the accomplished, wealthy businessman in the bespoke suit she and her husband had met sitting in first class, the man who had name-dropped a list of his clients and been so generous about their ambition.

Ellie got up.

"Or maybe we try again? And you can just, you know, ship everything the way you normally do? September in Alabama is hot as hell-it must have been a surprise coming from L.A."

Charles jumped up onto the sidewalk next to her, and before he could stop himself, the words piled out of his mouth.

"There is no try again. When we meet, I have very successful business. Now it is gone. It didn't have to be, but it is. Not my fault, but all my fault. You are young. You don't know the things that can happen in a life."