She goes silent, and I know she didn’t know. Aunt Marion never told her. Aunt Marion made it seem like she was paying for everything. And I wasn’t about to make Noni feel beholden, make her feel less than, make her … Fuck. I rub my bitten-down, messed-up fingers into my eyes, mascara flaking off in spidery chunks. I feel this sickening relief flood me, pure I got you—

But when I look at her, she’s staring at me, her own eyes mean with slick victory. “You shouldn’t have bothered. I had a plan to support myself.”

My pulse skips a daggering beat. “What does that even mean?”

“I got a book deal,” she says, a tidy, small, cruel grin brewing on her face. “That’s why I’m keeping that notebook. It’s for a book all about Mama. The Real Mireille Foix. About her favorite places. About her time with us. About all her secrets. The ones you haven’t sold already, to pay for your mind-numbing cocktails and exploding bags of trashy clothes,” she adds, eerily still. “The world will finally know that not all Foix Hammicks of our generation are superficial and fake.”

Shock spills over me like acid, followed by a tingling wave of rage. I gape at her, this liar, this thing who—up until a moment ago—I thought was so helpless, and then the words surge up my throat. “You fucking hypocrite.”

“Oh, relax. None of this matters now, anyway,” she snaps, offhand and glum, all of a sudden, and I see shades of Daria, of poisonous people I hate. “This trip might as well have torpedoed my book. It’s not like we even knew her at all.”

The tiny gray room spins and blackens, and I come to my feet, tottering, the swell of heat buoying me. “You are a fucking monster. A liar of the worst kind. You—you sanctiminious bitch. I can’t—I can’t believe I ever thought we could get along.” I think of the many times she punished me for sharing something about Mama that I carefully, thoughtfully chose, after hours of internal debate.

I know how to make people feel like they’re stealing a piece of me, a piece of us, when really they’re getting nothing but hot air. Noni clearly doesn’t. She’s so starved for attention and acclaim that she’ll sell everything we have for one ounce of something that also disperses like it’s nothing at all.

“You’re … not my family,” I tell her, and my eyes, my eyes feel like cinders. “You’re toxic.”

“Well, I’m all you have,” she says, thick with disdain. She drops onto the sofa, spent, and looks out the window. “So you can stop being so melodramatic.”