“Careful.” I put the palm of my hand against his skull. His dark hair was like a silk curtain. “Careful, okay?”

“When are you going to die, Dee?”

“Not for a really, really long time,” I told him.

“What about Daddy?”

“Not for a long time either.” I hoped Teddy didn’t notice my lack of enthusiasm on the subject of his father. I stretched my arms out. “Hug?”

He threw himself into my arms, pressing his face into my neck. There were so many things I wanted to tell him, but he was too young to hear them. Instead, we stayed like that, hugging for a long time.

“Would it be bad?” Teddy asked.

“What?”

“To go in Mama’s room?”

“No, sweetheart. Definitely not.” I felt like the devil, coaxing a three-and-a-half-year-old into breaking into his mother’s room, but I was dying to see inside. It wasn’t that I expected a clue to jump out at me. But if I’d learned anything over the past few days, it was that I didn’t know my sister the way I’d thought I had. I’d been fooled by the sheen of perfection that hovered around her. Not only had I missed the messiness hiding underneath; I’d never noticed it was there.

I stood and opened the door, instantly inhaling the scent of Caro’s floral perfume. Her room was as stereotypically feminine as Theo’s was masculine, with a plush bed drowning in pillows, a pair of chairs dressed in pale-rose velvet, and wooden furniture with painted flowers. Bizarrely, it reminded me of her bedroom when we were growing up. I recognized the antique chairs as ones our mother had picked up at a flea market, only re-covered with new fabric. The painted chest of drawers with climbing vines and pink flowers had been plucked directly from her childhood bedroom. The familiarity wasn’t comforting. If anything, it was the opposite. Maybe I’d run too far from my own pretty pink childhood room by living in a dark dungeon-like cell, but the fact Caro had re-created her bedroom did not feel emotionally healthy.

There were photographs in ornate frames around the room, and plaques mounted on the walls. One was from the New York City Mayor’s Office, another from the Diotima Civic Society. The latter looked more impressive—black lacquer etched with silver—and had a broken column with a female figure standing in front of it. Her appointment book was on her desk, and I sifted through it, but nothing important caught my eye.

Teddy stayed in the doorway, eyes wide like saucers as he took in the room. “Nothing changed,” he murmured.

“Did you think Mama’s room would be different?”

“Maybe.”