I’m swarmed by memories: by the moment Dad gave me my first desktop computer—preloaded with a chess game—and told me that I would go far if I could stay three steps ahead; by a conversation on the magic of the stars and how I could always find my way home to him by them; by a joint predawn plunge in the frigid waters of the lake—you have such a deep well of courage and love, unknown to you, and you can never exhaust either of them; by his rare, throaty laugh, and our dancing, our dancing, which made my baby soul burst up through the clouds and into the grand universe.

Dad. Dad, like he was before, before the illness broke him down. I feel a rush at hearing Dad—my dad, sound like himself. It’s been so long since I heard him. In hearing his voice, it feels like I’m getting him back, months after his death.

“Stop it. Stop it this instant,” I hear him say, inexplicably, and my heart pitches through the floor. Next to me, Saxim looks as gray as an unfinished pencil sketch.

“Dad?” I call out before I can stop myself.

The reply comes from another voice, a thinner, colder metal wire of a voice I can barely hear. There’s someone there. It doesn’t sound like Mina. This voice is male.

With Saxim on my heels, scrabbling for my wrists, I swipe Mama’s dusty Oscar, on display on a forgotten shelf and the only thing I can use as a weapon.

“Tai,” Saxim pleads, but I don’t stop. I dash toward the voices, bare feet slapping against the floor.

“You poisoned a boy,” Dad says.

My blood curdles. The other male voice answers, “You’re wrong.” Chills razor the thin skin on my arms.

“My brother told me. He wouldn’t lie,” Dad says, and I slow to a stop so I can hear them over my racing heartbeat. “You have no morals. I’ll tell the world, I will. You poisoned a boy.” My hands clench around the Oscar, its dead flesh slipping.

“You poisoned Mitso Arakit,” Dad says.

I drop the statuette with a heavy clunk, two inches from my toes.

The voice answers, brisk as an arctic wind, “No one will ever believe anything you say, you old fool. How can you even trust yourself?”

As I round the corner, I hear Dad reply, in this unfamiliar, almost panicked tone I’ve never heard, “That’s why my wife left, isn’t it?” He pauses, swallows thickly. “She discovered how corrupt you are. How ruined you are.”

I hear this, just as I see it:

The bed is empty, neatly made, with Mina perched beside it. She looks at me, with two flat lines on her calm lake of a face, as if she’s asleep.