“Rex told Muir we’re not actually together,” I say, into my arroz caldo.
Liana sorts chamomile from calendula. “How do you feel about that?”
“Furious.”
“And?”
“That’s the whole of it. Purely furious.”
“Mm,” she says.
“Don’t,” I say. “I came here to be angry in peace, not to bemm-ed at.”
“You came here,” Liana says, with the serenity of a woman who has a dragon-border-collie and a lion-man veterinarian and a garden full of things she grew herself and has nothing left to prove to anyone that she can in fact be a homesteading queen, “because you needed somewhere to put the feeling while you figured out what it actually is.” She slides the pandesal plate an inch closer to me. “Eat the bread. And there’s cheese,” she adds as if I hadn’t clocked it already.
I eat the bread and the cheese.
The kitchen smells like ginger and pandan and the dried herbs in their jars and something sweet from the oven that I haven’t investigated yet. Nugget makes a sound outside that is apparently his version ofall chickens accounted for, and Liana says “good boy” through the window without looking up, and theordinary domestic texture of all of it loosens a knot below my collarbone that I had not been aware was pulled tight.
“The pandesal,” I say, after a moment. “It’s different from last week.”
“Added more pandan. Roarke said the last batch was good but wanted more green. He’s wrong, but I tried it anyway.” She holds up a jar of something for inspection. “He’s usually wrong about the ratio and right about the feeling. It’s very annoying. Marriage is full of this.”
I think, involuntarily, about what it would be like to have someone who is usually wrong about the ratio and right about the feeling. I put this thought back where it came from.
“The selkie,” Liana says, in the same tone she’d use to saythe chamomile.
“Is working for me,” I say. “Professionally.”
“Mm,” she says again, and this time I let it stand because arguing with it requires more energy than I currently have.
She finishes the herbs. Then she goes to the big chest freezer in the corner—the kind that requires commitment, the kind that saysI am a person who plans ahead—and lifts the lid and rummages through it with the practiced ease of someone who knows exactly what’s in there and where.
“Here,” she says, and sets a large ziplock bag on the counter. Lumpia, a full batch, frozen in neat rows. “Pork and vegetable. They fry straight from frozen, four minutes each side. Don’t crowd the pan.”
I look at the bag. There are at least thirty pieces in it.
“Liana—”
“You’re going to have a complicated summer,” she says, simply, and goes to check the oven. “You should have lumpia on hand. It doesn’t solve anything but it helps.”
I pick up the bag. It is cold and solid and generous in the way that Liana is generous: without theater, without requiring acknowledgment, as though feeding people well is simply the obvious response to them being in the world and occasionally having a difficult time of it.
“Thank you,” I say.
She pulls a tray of biko from the oven. The smell of it arriving all at once, brown sugar and coconut cream, the kakanin my grandmother made on Sunday afternoons, Liana’s version close enough to catch me somewhere unguarded in the chest the way it always does.
“The rectangular pan,” she says. “That one’s for you. Not the tourists.”
She looks at me then, properly, over the oven tray. Her expression is kind without being careful. The kind of kind that doesn’t need to dress itself up.
“He stayed,” she says. “He stayed to work with you when he thought you’d moved on.”
“It’s a professional situation,” I say, one more time, with somewhat less conviction than the previous attempts.
Liana cuts the biko into squares with the clean authority of someone who has done this a thousand times. “Sure,” she says. “Take the lumpia. Come back when the biko’s cool and I’ll pack it up for you.”
I take the lumpia.