She has a long dresser against one wall. It’s covered in crystals and perfume bottles and framed photos. I pick one up. The frame is shaped like two calla lilies bending together. In the photo she has on a blue wig, and there are big pink circles painted on her cheeks. Her false lashes are obscenely long and disco gold. Her smile is electric. She’s wearing a hot-pink, furry bra and her neck is festooned with plastic beads in radioactive colors. Mardi Gras—parade of ghouls. I can tell she’s a little drunk. I wonder who took the picture. Gary, maybe? Who is making this memory with her?

I set it down, disturbed. I move on, picking each one up in turn.

She is wearing her outfit from this morning, or something like it, her arms draped around a goateed man in a top hat and a woman with black lipstick and white-blond hair.

She is hugging someone close to her, a woman with shockingly red hair and large teeth. Their cheeks are pressed together.

She’s standing next to a weird, life-size voodoo doll, laughing. It looks to be somewhere in the French Quarter.

They all seem to be from New Orleans, as though her life only began in the last three years.

At the end is a small frame with a three-by-five school picture. The girl is small, with dark, straight hair and a smattering of freckles across her nose. Her smile is crooked, unsure. She sits before a hazy backdrop, a bushel of spilled apples and some hay bales beside her. I recognize my nine-year-old self staring back at me—the plaid button-down Moony made me wear that day, the little silver ring shaped like a bow on one hand.

This picture upsets me the most. Did I want her to not care at all? Does this really prove anything, one picture in a frame out of a million missed moments? I don’t like knowing I am present here beyond my will. I think the old belief that pictures steal a piece of your soul must be right. I feel captive, this piece of me a hostage in her wayward life.

I open her drawers one by one. They’re full of the usual things—pajamas, underwear, T-shirts. I close the last one with a huff, disappointed. I haven’t uncovered any wads of cash. I’m not sure what else I was expecting to find. Drugs, maybe? Guns? A drawer full of sex toys? Something to prove how awful she is. Something that corroborates the story in my head, the one that casts her as the villain. Only someone that heinous could ditch their daughter. I don’t know how to reconcile anything else.