Chapter One one
AUGUST 2024

DAY 1 IN THE HOUSE

NORA Deng was informed of two rules before the reading of the will.

The first was not to speak to the Yin family without a lawyer present.

The second was to never go into the garden behind the Yin family house.

Nora didn’t argue when her mother told her these rules. She didn’t say much on the hour-and-a-half drive from their home in San Bernardino out west to Vivian Yin’s estate. She’d already exhausted her questions days ago, when Ma shared over dinner that a former actress named Vivian Yin had died, and that their family was included in the will. It was the first time Nora had ever heard Vivian Yin’s name. A quick search on her phone at the dinner table revealed that she was a Chinese American actress who was known for her movies in the eighties. She’d even won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, in a movie called Fortune’s Eye.

Nora was surprised. How in her twenty-one years had she never heard of this person? There were a few scattered tributes to Vivian Yin on the internet. A brief LA Times section on her. Nothing more.

Nora also had no idea why they were included in the will. When she’d asked, her mother had given her a long, hard look. The kitchen light shone harshly over Ma’s head, seeping into the lines around her eyes and reflecting off her silvery strands of hair. In Mandarin, she said, “I don’t know.”

“Is there some family connection? Are we a long-lost relative?” Nora had seen that in the movies; people plucked from suburban anonymity to discover that they were heirs to royalty. That would be nice.

“No,” Ma said sharply. “Why would you think that?”

“So we don’t know them and they don’t know us?”

Her mother paused. “My parents knew her.”

“Then… we’re family friends?”

Ma’s lips flattened into a thin line. “Will you help me clear the dishes?”

That Saturday they took the exit off the I-210 in the direction of the forest. The San Gabriel Mountains loomed in the distance. Nora glanced out at the low, misty morning clouds. Today was unusually overcast for August.

The house was in Altadena and rose up out of the hills. Ma turned onto a lone road that ended at rusted gates. She didn’t pull into the elongated driveway. Rather, she idled to a stop beside the curb. “Remember,” she said. “Don’t wander by yourself. Don’t go into that garden behind the house. Okay?”

This house was large; Nora hadn’t realized that until they got out of the car. There was a strange, dismal beauty to this place. It looked abandoned, almost sunken in shrubbery. The front yard was overgrown, the grass yellowing. Shriveled, emaciated vines crawled up the pale stone walls. But it still possessed a gentle grandeur that drew Nora’s attention, with its symmetrical sloping roofs, the balconies framing tall, arched windows crowned by florid embellishments, and the elegant curve of the front door that stood behind two columns.

As they walked up to the front door, Nora saw a minivan parked to their left in the circular courtyard and driveway in front of the house.

“Nora,” her mother said. “Promise.”

Nora glanced over. She tucked her short hair behind her ears and tugged up her jeans. Ma’s gaze unnerved her just a bit. “Okay.”

The cavernous doors opened.

MADELINE Wang sat at her grandmother’s dining room table the day after her funeral and looked at the person sitting across from her, who happened to stare right back. This person—Nora Deng, she’d introduced herself as—looked to be around Madeline’s age, right out of college or maybe still in it. Cropped hair fell around her sharp jawline. Her fingers toyed with a loose thread on her sleeve. Slightly to Nora’s right was a middle-aged woman wearing an ill-fitting red sweater, whom Madeline assumed was her mother, Elaine Deng.

So she was the person Ma was talking about on their way here. The one person outside the family who made it into the will.

Madeline felt small in here. The ceiling stretched over them. Spare, listless light filtered through the drawn curtains, revealing the thick layer of dust on the long mahogany table. The house had this persistent and unpleasant sour smell of mildew and damp wood, and the chairs groaned every time someone shifted positions. Madeline silently urged the white man presiding at the head of the table to just read her grandmother’s will already and get it over with.

Her chair creaked loudly, and her mother shot her a look. Lucille Wang clasped her hands and looked ahead expectantly. She’d strategically taken a seat closest to the lawyer, her notepad in front of her. Her dark hair was pulled back in a bun. A half-inch or so of silver roots showed. She wore a navy blazer. Madeline knew this was her war suit. Ma was a lawyer too, and in this moment she was making sure everyone knew it. Madeline’s yí ma, Aunt Rennie, on the other hand, leaned away from the table and looked like she wanted to disappear. She wore an oversized shawl-like cardigan. Her dark brown hair was starting to slip out of its clip.

The lawyer cleared his throat. Madeline was sitting close enough that she could see the name on his binder. Reid Lyman. “Are we all settled?”

Madeline nodded with everyone.

“We are gathered here to hear the last will and testament of Vivian Yin.” He had a deep voice. “I have been named the executor of the will. Thank you to all parties for being present for the reading upon her request.”

Madeline remembered precisely the day and the moment when her mother came home early from work. Ma had entered the living room with a vacant look in her eyes and dropped her bag to the ground, and that was when Madeline found out her grandmother was dead. They’d sat on the couch together in silence for what could have been minutes or the better part of that day. Ma then called Aunt Rennie; it went to voicemail twice before she’d picked up. When her aunt finally answered the phone, Ma disentangled herself to go upstairs and shut herself in her room.

And then, that next day, her mother abruptly kicked into action. She drafted the obituary and planned the funeral, which had originally consisted of her and Madeline and Aunt Rennie. Madeline’s dad eventually came up for the day, a gesture of kindness that softened her mother, if only momentarily. She pestered the LA Times to include the obituary, calling the Entertainment desk over and over.

And then, finally, Ma told Madeline about Wài Pó’s house. “We’ll just stay there for a short time,” she’d said. “You and me and your yí ma. Two weeks at most to get everything in order. And then we sell it.”

“But that’s your childhood home,” Madeline had said. “Don’t you want to keep it?”

“No. We don’t.”

They’d driven up two hours from their home in Newport Beach with their bags that Sunday morning. They were all supposed to meet at the house an hour before the reading of the will; Aunt Rennie didn’t come until fifteen minutes before, citing car issues and having needed to hail a rideshare. Ma was slightly irked. But now they were all here. Madeline arched her head up, staring at the way the reddish ceiling beams curved toward each other with intricate wood carved corners, observing this house as she would an artifact in a museum. Whatever had been painted up there was long faded, cracks splitting through the paint.

She felt detached from this place. Her mother was the one who grew up in this house, with Aunt Rennie, with Madeline’s grandmother—her wài pó—who once was an actress in Hollywood. ?? had been married to another actor, too, named Richard Lowell; Aunt Rennie’s father and Ma’s stepfather. He’d died when Ma was seventeen and Aunt Rennie was fourteen. And then Ma left for college and never really lived here again.

Suddenly Madeline’s passing curiosity twinged into a sharp longing to have lived here; to have known her grandmother beyond her fleeting childhood memories. When she was little, Wài Pó would come to their house in Newport Beach. She would make dumplings for lunch. Then ?? would take her to the nearby park, her hand clutching Madeline’s.

But then she started fading from their lives. Ma wanted Wài Pó to sell her house and move in with them; Wài Pó refused. She turned down holidays. Ma tried calling her, but she would rarely answer. When Madeline was eleven, she watched a pixelated, pirated version of the movie that won her grandmother her Oscar, Fortune’s Eye, where Wài Pó played a Chinese American woman looking for her brother in the gold rush. The camera work was jarring, the music brassy and melodramatic, but still her grandmother was captivating in every scene. It felt strange, unauthorized almost, to witness the younger, animated version of the person who now shut them out. Madeline never mentioned it to anyone; no one ever brought that movie up.

“The first matters are of her finances,” the lawyer said, bringing Madeline back to the present. Her mother leaned forward. “To her daughters: Yin Chen, Lucille Wang, and Yin Zi-Meng, Renata Yin-Lowell—she intends to distribute a sum of forty thousand dollars to be divided as the two beneficiaries see fit.”

Madeline watched Ma’s glance dart down the table at Aunt Rennie. “That’s—” She swallowed her words. “Forty thousand?” she said, in hoarse Mandarin. Aunt Rennie was frozen. And then, almost immediately, Ma’s shock folded shut. “There must be a mistake,” she said in English.

The girl across from Madeline just watched, her expression flickering with scorn. Madeline felt jarred by Ma’s outburst. It still was a substantial figure. Madeline wanted to melt into the floor. How much money had they been expecting, exactly?

But then again, if her grandmother lived in this place, shouldn’t she have had more?

Ma was still bewildered. “This is the entirety of her inheritance? What about her accounts? Her investments?”

“This was all decided on,” the lawyer said. “The monetary inheritance. And for the next—”

“We’re not done here. Where’s the rest?”

“Let him finish, will you?” Elaine Deng finally spoke up.

Ma’s glance cut over to the woman across the table. “I’m sorting out my family matters.”

Elaine said nothing more but smiled, spitefully polite. Aunt Rennie reached out a hand. “It’s okay,” she said softly, sounding unsure herself. “There’s the house.”

“Which leads us to the next clause,” the lawyer said. “The estate.” He shifted in his chair and looked, not at Ma, not at Madeline’s side of the table, but to the two people seated across from them. “Vivian Yin has decided that upon her death, the ownership of this estate and all its matters will hereby be transferred to Elaine Deng.”

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