But yesterday, when Margot knocked at Mrs. Baek’s door, no one answered. And now, Wednesday, Christmas Eve, Margot had only one place left to search.

Margot and Miguel drove past houses decorated with holiday string lights and plastic Santas to her mother’s church, which would be having separate services in Spanish, Korean, and English. Afterward, they’d have dinner at a Oaxacan restaurant that neither of them had been to but had heard good things about—rich red and black moles and live music in an oilcloth setting.

Despite the circumstances, both of them felt the need to do something for Christmas. In a place as warm and bone-dry as Los Angeles, the holiday season still seemed chilly, especially at night, when locals donned boots and down jackets and sweaters. And the festivities provided at least a hearth of togetherness and activity—shopping, cooking, the resurrection of plastic trees, the ribbons, the lights. The smell of pozole and birria, meats long-simmered in chilies and herbs, and traces of Korean food with its piquant kimchi and stews and bulgogi filled the hallways of her apartment building. Christmas cacti decorated drab balconies in fuchsias. Supermarket poinsettias flourished, brazen and flaming red. The children off from school ran around at all hours.

Outside of Margot’s car, men on bicycles zoomed by in traffic; commuters chatted at the bus stop, plastic bags bulging with groceries; street vendors sold everything from oranges and peeled mangoes served on a stick to shiny boom boxes and soft polyester blankets printed with teddy bears and cartoon hearts.

“Do you think it might be time to call Officer Choi again?” Miguel asked, sitting in the passenger seat. “I mean, we know what we know about Mr. Park, right? He’s been stalking Mrs. Baek. He was apparently at your mom’s apartment.”

“I would think that if Mrs. Baek wanted the police involved, she would’ve called them already,” Margot said. “She might be scared that he’d retaliate somehow.”

“But he already could’ve hurt your mom. Isn’t that enough for us all to be scared?”

“We don’t know that for certain yet. I just hope Mrs. Baek’s at church tonight. If we see her, we could let her know that the landlord saw Mr. Park at my mom’s apartment. I don’t even have to mention what the waitress told me about him buying the restaurant and stalking Mrs. Baek, right? I’ll ask her about Mr. Park, if I can call the police. I just don’t want to do anything that could harm her.” She sighed. “I wish—I wish this wasn’t happening all at once. I feel like I’m falling behind, like I’m not fast enough. I’ll never be—”

“You were sick last week,” Miguel said. “Your mom died. You just figured out the identity of your dad. This would be too much for literally anyone.”

Tears filled her eyes.

“It’s a miracle that you’re still standing after all you’ve been through. You’re tough.”

It was the first time anyone had told her that, and she believed him. She had always thought of herself as sensitive, fearful, even passive at times, but he was right. She had gotten her strength from her mother. Her mother was bold—moving to this country where she didn’t know the language and laws, falling in love, raising a daughter by herself.

And in these past few weeks, Margot alone had knocked on unknown doors, sold her mother’s store, stood up to a police officer—actions she couldn’t have imagined doing even a month ago. Her life had seemed so banal back then: managing to avoid Jonathan, her coworker with whom she had that relationship last year, sorting years of paperwork in her boss’s office, scrolling through endless dating profiles online, editing and obsessively adjusting clip art in a program newsletter. Now she was driving around the city, searching for the truth of herself, the truth of her mother, of whether she was murdered.

“So when I got sick last week?” Margot said. “I have a sneaking suspicion . . . I know this sounds really paranoid, but it’s almost like that guy—the driver, the hot one?—it’s almost like he poisoned me. That tea didn’t taste right.”

Miguel covered his mouth in shock. “I swear to God, I was thinking the same thing when you told me. But I didn’t want to scare you.”

“Shit. You can’t trust people who are that good-looking.”

“Do you plan on calling her, too?” Miguel asked. “Mrs. Kim? I mean, I know this could all be separate, but . . . I guess, if you wanted more info on your dad? Or are you too creeped out?”

“I’ll call her. I was thinking after the holidays, let her settle down a little.” Margot sighed. “For now, I think it’s best that we find Mrs. Baek. She’s the only one who could know about my mom’s other family, the husband and daughter. And I’m afraid that because of Mr. Park, she might disappear or go somewhere else.”

After circling the block a few times, they nudged their way into a tiny parking spot, questionably close to a defunct-looking hydrant. Walking up the front steps of the Spanish-style church, they went inside to see it was completely full of families dressed in their best. Heads bowed, everyone listened as the Irish priest, speaking Korean, led them in prayer.

At the rear of the church, Margot and Miguel wedged themselves between strangers and leaned against the cold walls. The smell of incense, old paper, and dust intermingled with the personal fragrances, the perfumes around them—a heady mix of florals, evergreen, and spice. This devotion to the senses, to the sounds of scripture and song, the fragments of color that could barely be seen from the stained glass windows at night, coalesced in this space where ritual and practice among strangers created a community. This was why her mother had returned here each Sunday, because she could insert herself and, without a word or even a glance, belong.

The last time they had gotten into an argument about church, Margot had been fifteen or sixteen years old, mutinous and loud enough to scare her mother. That was about the same age when she had fully given up on learning Korean, too, the same age when her defiance was the only thing she had to feel alive. And anything about her mother—her foreignness, her poverty, her powerlessness—became only a mirror for what Margot did not want to be or become.

“I don’t believe in God,” Margot had said in English, washing dishes after dinner. “I don’t want to go to church tomorrow.”

“You don’t believe in God?” her mother replied in Korean, wiping the table. “Do you know what happens to people who don’t believe in God?”

“Yes, of course.”

Her mother approached, cornering Margot. “Do you want to go to hell?”

Despite her fatigue after a long day of work, twelve hours or so of running around downtown for inventory, courting customers who mostly ignored her, who sometimes called her “china,” laughing at her face, her mother, in an argument, drew words from her deepest well, her deepest fears.

“I don’t believe in hell.” Already exhausted, Margot rinsed the pot under the hottest water, steam rising, tickling her face.

Her mother’s hand slapped the counter. “Do you want to go to hell?”

“If there was a God, He wouldn’t let us suffer,” Margot shouted, turning off the tap. “He wouldn’t let so many of us be poor.” Her voice had risen in English, and she couldn’t tell how much her mother would understand, but it didn’t matter. She needed to say this out loud. “He wouldn’t make life so hard for us. There wouldn’t be war. He wouldn’t make life hard for so many people.” Tears gushed out of her eyes. She couldn’t stop herself now.

“What about when you die? Uh?” Her mother gestured to the ground as if they would all be buried right on the spot under the beige linoleum of their floors.

“When I die, I’ll be dirt. It doesn’t matter.”

“What about when you die?” Her index finger, shaking, pointed toward Margot’s chest. “How will people find you? Uh? How will you find the people you lost?” Her mother, who rarely cried, sobbed. “How will you find the people you lost?”

At the sight of her mother’s face cracked open, Margot rushed past her into the bathroom where she perched on the toilet, weeping about the impossibility of living with her mother, tyrannous but every now and then, unexpectedly transparent, leaking light from the disasters of her life—her single motherhood, her childhood as an orphan, the war, the hours and hours without a proper day off, without a vacation, that she put into the store.

Margot never knew what to do with the bright flashes of who her mother was that would threaten to burn them all to the ground.

She could hear the squeak of the carpeted f loor as her mother stood outside the bathroom, listening to Margot cry. Margot imagined her now—her fingers pressed against the closed door, her head leaning forward, her hand curled in a fist to knock, but then she retreated.