To promise her I’ll write her story with her, the right story, because she deserves it.

When I say this to Tai, her blue eyes cringe, softening at the outer corners.

“You need to rest. No one could have expected an eight-year-old to begin to understand this situation,” she says, daintily reaching for my hand. “I mean, we barely understand it now.” Walking on eggshells around me, like I’m sick, ruined. Like I’m younger than her and in need of protection. My gut surges with the bitter wrongness of this.

I let her hand sit there next to my lap, but I don’t react. Taking it would be admitting she’s the one protecting me, now. And if I’m not protecting her, if I’m not managing her, what’s the point of me?

I know this is a lie written by my own pain. I can feel the fizzy pennies stirring, their stale buzz haunting my insides, still.

What I need now is to write. Yes. To write and parse through what is happening in my head, because that’s what’s been missing these few days—that’s why the pennies came back like this. They’re melded-together worries, left to react and sizzle in the blocked chemical pathways of my brain. It’s only in the writing that I can melt them and clear paths for them to flush away. Just breathe, my love, I hear Mama say, holding down my sweaty limbs while I thrashed in bed, seven years old, eight years old. Just breathe and let them melt away.

But I don’t say any of this to Tai. Instead, I smile and say, “You’re right.” I wait until her hand shrinks from my side, until she stands, still frowning, and drifts out the door. And when she leaves me alone, I post myself at my desk over my lavender-field notebook—the one Hérrakí returned, the one with my notes, the details that will ensure I’m the one to find Mama. And I try to write, pen poised.

I must write. I should write through it all, like Mama taught me.

But the words don’t come.

So when I hear the stream of the shower in the other room, I text Tai: Sorry about last night. Taking a nap—let’s talk later.

And I lock my bedroom from the outside, then slip out the front door, still cottony numb from the pill I fed myself, before skidding down the fire stairs and escaping through the building’s back door alone.

He answers on the first ring and agrees to meet. So I weave through the humid Limatra streets, unthinking, and I only come to when I get stuck behind a group of girls in Birkenstocks and socks near the entrance to the park we’re meeting at—some of them carrying black shopping bags of merchandise labeled BLOOD MOON FOX.