She stares at the trembling surface of the liquid. “Something was seriously fucking wrong with her. Lady. Let’s just say the woodcutter is the lumberjack, and the lumberjack was her stalker. Why would she go there at all? Why would she ask a stranger to send us there? Was she trying to get us killed?” And her eyes squinch up, and I gape at her as fat tears spill over her eyelashes. “Why would she hide such weird-ass, dark clues in White Fox at all? Why would she leave an unfinished script for us but not come find us herself?”

I wrap my arms around her as her nose runs. I don’t want to tell her that there are so many more reasons that something was wrong. Mama spent over twenty years working at her institute, refining every procedure and grant, but then she left notes full of cash to individuals like Yuki.

Was she giving up? Did she know her Viloki Eden was never going to work out?

“We’re close to answers, Tai,” I say instead. “We’re close to finding her.”

The words sound clichéd, hollow at the core, but they are what matters. That’s all that can matter, otherwise …

“You were right to bring us out here,” I say, interrupting my own melancholy thoughts. “We have one real lead. The woodcutter. We wouldn’t have found it, if not for you. And ten years have passed. You don’t think the police will have scoped out every single possible stalker? Noxim is a ghost town. You said it yourself. We’re perfectly safe.”

She eyes me with trepidation. With more of that all-consuming doubt. Gone is the Tai who said we were too famous to kill, I think, hiding my own paroxysms of fear in my big-sister way.

As we leave the restaurant, she discards Yuki’s flowers. I don’t offer to put them inside my backpack for her, because I understand that her abandonment of the dark totem is intentional. I think of Yuki, who said she studied performance art but only got a job with Katox the donkey.

I don’t think she likes her flowers much, either.

And I don’t want anything more weighing Tai down when we visit the woodcutter at last.

After a meandering eight-minute drive alongside the murky woods, we discover, behind a fallen tree riddled with termite holes, a dilapidated shack ringed by a sharp arrowhead fence that sits crooked, like someone desperately tried to yank it out. No inviting flowers, like the house in the story, only dirty, ripped netting over the windows—in fact, there’s little resemblance to that house at all.