I rush past the staircase toward the gate and throw myself at the mercy of the Quarter. And then I am in a dream I’ve dreamt before, only in my dream the maze of the Quarter was silent and empty, and now it is pulsing with sound: raised voices and pumping music. And it is clogged with warm, flush, perspiring bodies—people milling and clotting and clumping in the streets, forming crowds and breaking away only to come together again on another block.

I take the first turn, remembering the turn I took first in the dream. But I don’t know where to go from here. Sabrina’s words keep sounding in my ears. There is no before. There is just the rape and everything that comes after.

How did I not see it? As I wound my way to the nucleus of my mother’s story, I dragged her with me, right back to the heart of what broke her in the first place. And now, the whole thing is melting down. I was so desperate for answers, for something that would help me understand so I could put some of my own indignance behind me and forge a way forward with her, so I could feel something other than abandoned, that I didn’t stop to think about whether her story should be told. I didn’t stop to notice the triggers happening right now in my search for the ones from years ago.

What are you willing to pay for truth?

Were they trying to tell me all along? The strangers I have met? Were they protecting her or protecting me? Were they real or a shared delusion? A bubble birthed by Madora Charles’s mind that expanded until it swallowed her daughter and Moony, my mother and even me?

The only lie that exists is the one you hold to be true. The only power is your own.

Where did I give myself away? In the hard, enduring denial that was my life behind the window with the red hibiscus, my life with Moony? Or in the weeks since? In the streets of this clash-and-clamor city and the movement of the low and mournful song that is my mother’s life? Where did I lose sight of myself?

I hardly know.

I pick up speed. Pushing my frantic steps against the lively beats of the Quarter until I am running. My lungs begin to burn, and my sides begin to ache as if I’ve been stabbed, but I don’t slow. All I know is that she is roosted in this tangle of streets like a flightless hen, and if I press on, I might find her before the fox does.