Her family had maids. It doesn’t matter that Merry has her passport, that she sleeps in a guest bedroom, that she comes and goes as she pleases. Naj’s family, her beloved grandparents, had paid a woman a paltry amount to leave her country and life, and no amount of love for her, no legacy of two decades, of trips home for the holidays, of she’s like family, can erase the reality that she is not, in fact, family, that Merry seems fortified by this truth, attached to it more than anyone, which Naj is both self-conscious of and grateful for. It holds them liable; it grants them no exit from the
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