They mobbed Tai and me, sobbing and supplicating at our prepubescent feet as we entered and exited friends’ homes and therapists’ offices, hollowed out, in the weeks after Mama disappeared.

“Aunt Marion only let us spend three days in Limatra for Dad’s funeral, Manon,” Tai says, reading my mind. She slurps down champagne to stem the tears lacquering her eyes. “Dad’s fucking funeral.”

Three days was more than enough last summer, in the place where Mama disappeared, where Dad became sick and paranoid, dying very much alone. Three days was all that was safe. If we went back for longer, it would mean facing too much pain at every turn. But Tai doesn’t get that, because I’m the one who always shields her from it.

I pluck the phone from her hand and keep reading the invitation. “‘Cochaired by Antella Arnoix’”—my blood runs cold, and she glares at me—“and Tiro Nítuchí?”

Nítuchí. Our father’s right hand, once upon a time. Evil in human form, the bogeyman in our most vivid nightmares. I will never forget Nítuchí’s first visit to Stökéwood after Mama disappeared.

The company offers its condolences, he’d said in Vilosh, standing at the threshold of her library and casting a long shadow.

My stomach slowly roiled with hot glue; Tai whimpered beside me. I refused to answer, choosing instead to stare at him and scowl. The little man had blinked at me and paused for several seconds. I felt better, for a moment. But then I detected the smallest smug smile growing on his face, a tumor of a thing. It wasn’t just telling me he had suspected she would abandon us—so many of our father’s colleagues had wondered aloud if dedicating herself to motherhood and her Foix Institute would be too banal and dry a life for her. Taking a flighty actress for a wife was an imprudent risk our father had been warned about, I’d come to learn from gossip rags years later.

No—on Nítuchí’s smirking face I saw pure, unadulterated satisfaction that Mama was gone. She was a problem, neatly solved. A mistake, corrected. His malevolence was as easy to detect as Mama’s presence in her lavender smell.

You should learn how to speak Vilosh and English in the presence of your father’s colleagues. Your mother was not sufficiently concerned with your education. But you are, after all, only female.

The thought of him filled me with a sense of doom.

Now he’s the acting CEO of Hero Pharmaceuticals, ever since he forced Dad to step down. And apparently the cochair of this retrospective, for reasons I don’t want to think about.

“Forget about them,” Tai says. “We’re not kids anymore.”

But seeing him and his cronies wouldn’t be the worst part of returning to Viloxin. No.