Gulnora Karimova did not believe a man could be married until he had eaten her plov in her own kitchen, and she did not care how many board members he had.

"Sunday," she told Dilly on the phone, in Uzbek, on Friday morning. "Bring him Sunday. Not the car. Not the man with the cap. Walk."

"Ona, he can't walk to Dray Street. It's four miles and he's—"

"He is what?"

Dilly looked across the Thornquist breakfast room. Sel was on his third cup of tea, studying a stack of memos with the slow intensity of a man trying to read through a window. He looked up and raised his eyebrows. He had colour in his face today. He had slept five hours and eaten an egg.

"He's tired," she said.

"Then he can sit down at my table," said her mother, and hung up.

So they went on Sunday in the car, with Pascual parked half a block away and the engine running, and Sel in an old grey cardigan he had borrowed from Bettina's husband because Junie had screamed at the sight of his suit. He carried a bunch of yellow tulips. He carried them slightly too far from his body, like a man delivering a subpoena. At the door of Karimov Wash & Fold, which was closed on Sundays and smelled of detergent and onions and cumin, he stopped.

"I should tell you I'm frightened," he said.

"Of my mother?"

"I have been in rooms with senators. I have been shouted at by the Federal Reserve. Your mother looked at me on Tuesday as if I were a stain."

"She does that to everyone. It means she's interested."

"I do not find that reassuring."

The flat above the shop was two rooms and a kitchen, hot and yellow and crowded. Rustam had set up a ring light in the corner, then taken it down, then put it up again. Gulnora had cooked enough plov for twelve: a great black kazan on the stove, the rice golden with carrots and cumin, lamb on the bone, whole garlic heads sunk into the top like pale stones. A plastic tablecloth with lemons on it. Four mismatched chairs. A framed photograph of a Tashkent street Dilly had never seen, and a smaller one of her own father, who had died when she was ten, young and laughing under a mulberry tree.

Sel looked at the photograph for a long time. He did not say anything about it. It was the right choice.

"Sit," said Gulnora. "Eat. Then I ask questions."

He ate. He ate carefully and without hurry, like a man at a state dinner, until Gulnora said, "Faster. It gets cold," and he ate faster. Rustam watched him over the rim of a glass with the hungry, sidelong delight of a man who had only recently learned that he could be in the room. Dilly sat with her fork motionless and watched her mother watch Sel.

"You have parents?"

"My father died when I was twenty-two. My mother left when I was seven. She lives in Lisbon. She sends me a card on my birthday and sometimes it arrives on the right day."

"You cook?"

"I do not."

"You clean?"

"I have staff. I am aware that this is a disgrace."

"You fold?"

Sel blinked. "I beg your pardon?"

Gulnora rose from the table, went through the connecting door into the shop, and returned with a flat white bedsheet, king-size, still warm from the dryer. She shook it out between her hands with a single crack. "You hold this end," she said, "and I hold this end. Dilnoza, you stay."

"Ona, he's—"

"A man who cannot fold a sheet cannot be trusted with a family. It's a fact."

And so the richest man in Corliss Ferry, in a borrowed cardigan, with a plate of lamb at his elbow, found himself standing in the Karimov kitchen holding two corners of a hot sheet while a fifty-six-year-old laundress gave him instructions in a mixture of English, Uzbek and hand gestures. Corner to corner. No. Higher. Not like a flag, like a letter. Walk toward me. Walk. Now the other way. Gulnora's hands moved with a speed that astonished Dilly even now, a speed that turned cotton into a clean white rectangle in four folds. Sel followed. He followed badly, and then slightly better, with his tongue between his teeth and the unbearable earnestness of a child doing a spelling test. On the fourth fold their hands met on the edge of the sheet. He looked up, startled. Gulnora, with enormous gravity, took the finished square from him, and set it on the chair, and patted it.

"Good," she said. "Crooked. But you did not give up."

Rustam made a noise into his glass.

"Do not film," said Sel, without turning.

"I'm not filming."

"You're holding your phone at chest height in a manner consistent with filming."

"It's a grip," Rustam said with dignity. "I just have a grip." Then, in a smaller voice, when Gulnora had gone to refill the kazan, "Seriously, though, are you real? Like, are you actually going to be nice to her? Because she won't tell you if you're not."

Sel considered the question. He treated it with the same grave courtesy as if it had come from the Federal Reserve.

"I do not know how to be anything but real," he said. "It is, I'm told, my principal defect. But I will tell you what I can promise. If there is a day when I cannot be nice to her, I will tell her first, and then I will tell you."

Rustam looked at his sister. Dilly looked at the lemons on the tablecloth.

"Okay," Rustam said. "That's weirdly good. I hate it."

The roof of the laundromat was reached by an iron ladder bolted to the back wall, up from the alley where the dryer vents breathed out warm lint. It was flat, tarred, scattered with old bricks and pigeon feathers. A line of dead geraniums in tins. Behind the parapet, Corliss Ferry spread out under the last of the evening, the river and the Fairhold tower pale gold against it, and Pellow Hill in the distance, every window lit.

She had come up here at fifteen when her father's illness took the whole flat. She had come up here at twenty-seven after the bad day. Never with anyone.

Sel took the ladder slowly, with her below him, and sat on an upturned crate with a long exhale. She sat on the parapet and told him. She told it in the flat, ordered voice of an after-action report: the click, the instruction, Copy. The drive. The voice with no breath. She told him her own name on the recording, the way it sounded in the earpiece, so close it might have been inside her skull. She told him how she had come to be standing there with her hands at her sides while the one hundred and forty events before were erased.

She finished. The pigeons shifted in the eaves.

"I did what I was told," she said. "I've spent fourteen months in a place where I thought I'd failed, and I was doing what I'd been trained to do. I held. I was ordered to hold, by a voice that sounded like my partner, and I held. I've been so ashamed that I was a coward, and I wasn't. I was a good employee."

She was surprised to find she was laughing. It was an ugly sound, a bit wet. Sel did not speak.

"I think," he said carefully, after a time, "that it would be unwise of me to say anything wise."

"Good."

"I should like, instead, to be very rude to the man who did it. In several subordinate clauses."

She turned her head. He was looking out at the river, not at her, and the last light made his face almost young.

"I do not know many things about courage," Sel said. "But I know that it is much easier to be brave when one has been told it is permitted. Someone arranged for you to be told the opposite. At a moment when it would be most visible. I find that I want to know why, rather more than I want to be polite."

"That's the nicest thing anyone's said to me all year."

"I am afraid that is probably also true." He took a phone from his cardigan pocket. It was one of the new, clean work phones; she had issued it herself. "I have something else, and I did not know whether to tell you today. Eun-ji's investigator got back to me an hour ago. He has been looking for Mr. Fenwick-Mbeki since Thursday."

"You had someone look for him. Without asking me."

"I did," said Sel. "Yes. It occurred to me after I had done it that it falls under item one of your terms, and I should have asked. I am sorry. It is a family failing. We do things for people."

She should have been furious. She found, instead, that she was looking at his face, and that he was bracing, and that she wanted very much to say it was fine.

"Show me," she said.

He handed her the phone. On the screen was a photograph from a corporate newsletter, a staged portrait of a smiling executive in a charcoal jacket in front of a glass lobby. The caption read: Ardent National is delighted to announce Dario Fenwick-Mbeki as Head of Regional Executive Protection, effective this spring.

She read it three times.

Beneath it, a second photograph, a screenshot of a calendar entry, in the clipped style of a corporate diary. Ardent National. CEO C. Valdivia-Moon. Arrival: Corliss Ferry, Monday 9:10. Meeting request: 'To congratulate Mr. Thornquist-Adeleke on his engagement, and meet the bride.'

Her voice, when it came, was perfectly level.

"He's coming tomorrow," she said. "And he's bringing Dari."