“He—he thought he loved her, I guess. He was a superfan. A … a stalker. He wrote to her often. He was troubled, okay? And she became obsessed with him. Obsessed with talking about him, with showing me his letters, with wondering if there was something, anything, we could do to help him lead a healthier life.” He watches us, eyes bloodshot. “As if that was her responsibility, somehow. I didn’t take the letters seriously, even as they became … darker and angrier, because … I don’t know, he lived with his mother, for Pete’s sake. This was before incels and all of that.” He exhales shakily. “I have copies of the letters, if you want to see. Do you want to see?” And before we can answer, he bounds toward the back hall.

Noni and I sit in silence, dust motes floating between us. The blood settling in our heads. I can’t feel my hands or feet, but I see hers, pale and threaded with veins.

When Teddy returns, he hands us a rumpled stack of notepaper.

The letters, written in the tangled English of an unfamiliar hand, begin the year before Mama left.

I’m so excited to see you, he wrote. I’ve thought about this moment for so long. I’ve imagined you a hundred different ways. I hope that doesn’t sound strange. Does it? I just know you’ll love me, and I’ll love you.

We’ll be together so soon.

I swallow down my knot of a heart and find another letter, deeper in the pile.

You are a lying bitch and a fucking hypocrite, it reads. “Helping people at any cost?” I hope you rot and maggots crawl through your flesh.

It’s dated the month before she left.

NONI

I can hardly hear myself, hear my uncle, over the gnawing static in my head, but I breathe to listen, I try. “You have to understand: Mitso Arakit couldn’t have hurt her,” he explains. “He had an accident a few months before and was bedbound at the time of her disappearance. These letters are ill-timed and scary, that’s all.”

“An accident a few months before,” I repeat in a monotone, that fizz, burning me now, eating its way down my throat and into the cavity of my chest.

Teddy stares at his hands, like he’s bewildered, like he’s struggling. “I don’t know. But he was bedbound, I’m sure of it. Your father and Nítuchí promised me that.”

“What do you mean, my father and Nítuchí promised you that?” Tai asks, and the grinding churn of that hiss, it’s building, it’s hurting.