“She told me because I was going through a different kind of reinvention at the time,” Yuki says, beginning with the towel on one cheek. “She wished so hard to reinvent herself that she did it. Why shouldn’t we be whomever we want to be, especially if it hurts no one? Even if it does hurt someone else a little, at first? We only have one life.”

A judder runs through me, one I can feel even on Noni’s clammy skin.

“What was the promise?” Noni asks. “The promise you said you made her.”

“Ah, yes. On one of your mother’s last visits, she said to me—clear as day—‘Yuki, if my girls ever visit you as adults, you must send them to the woodcutter. Promise me that.’ And I said—”

“A woodcutter is a lumberjack,” Nons says—mostly to me.

“She told you her name was Lady,” I repeat, feeling at the sweating nape of my neck.

Yuki glares. “And I said to her, ‘Lady, why don’t you just buy your daughters a couple of the little figurines and take them to them now?’ And she said, ‘No, they need to see all of them in the same shop, set up like animals in a park, in a zoo.’ And I said to her then—‘Lady, why not just bring them to the shop now yourself?’ And she turned pale as the moon, I’m telling you. She said to me, ‘I can’t bring them to Noxim, Yuki, because their father doesn’t want them in town.’ She glanced outside, and I thought she meant it because of the paparazzi. They’d been lurking around the town to catch glimpses of the family, and Mr. Hammick did not want anyone to disturb you girls.”

“So the woodcutter is … what, or who, exactly?” Noni asks, while I weave my fingers together and try to breathe, try to untie the gnarled knot in my stomach, by some kind of yogic magic.

“It’s a shop run by the same family for many years. I’ll show you where. They make these little figures. They’re absolute kitsch, but I promised her that I’d tell you to go there, and that I would tell no one else. Just like I’ve never spoken a word about White Fox, either. She told me, you know, that its five pieces would be a map to understanding her, if anything happened to her, and then something did—”

“Sorry—five pieces?” Nons asks.

She pauses. “Yes, five. It’s my birthdate, so I would never forget—”

“What do you mean, ‘if anything happened to her?’” I ask, voice cracking.

Yuki shakes her head. “That’s all she said. Nothing more. I swear it.”

“We only have three pieces,” Nons whispers to me.