“Don’t be rude,” I whisper to Tai under my breath, as the car rolls forward.

“I’m so tired and hungry I could cry,” Tai says. “We can suck his dick later, okay? Just let me unpack and take a bath.”

“Thaïs Hammick,” I hiss back, with a look at the driver.

But he and Tai are already staring straight ahead, where Stökéwood’s peaks have appeared. Its silhouette grows from a jagged yet familiar mound into its full over-the-top glory, throwing my heart into its first backflip. My childhood home, Stökéwood. A several-centuries-old basalt castle, built in an H shape (Fit for a Hammick, they said), with four dangerous towers accessible only by rusty ladders, with double-height ceilings made for a place of worship, with underground tunnels and mazelike corridors leading to so many rooms lost to the light. The hypermodern extension is visible too— built in an H shape (For Hëró, they said) by our father forty years ago. Dozens of filthy twelve-foot windows of glass wink at us ominously, the cataract-filmed eyes of an elderly grande dame lost to madness.

Once built to look imposing, now Stökéwood looks like an abandoned castle from a postapocalyptic movie, well past the cusp of dereliction: It looks like a place where good goes to die.

The car stops short of the rotunda near the front door, and while Tai wrestles with her explosion of monogrammed leather bags, I slip the driver a few extra bills to linger outside the front gate. There’s no chance I’m staying the night here, what with the family apartment in Limatra—I have an appointment in town this afternoon to do research for my book, anyway. He refuses all of my cash politely, explaining he will simply wait outside the gate until I return. I watch him discreetly crane his neck to try to spy inside the house, but the overgrown five-foot spears of green foxglove planted in abundance block any view through the windows. Stökéwood sentinels, those foxít.

How is it that all of this still exists? Dried-out stone marlins wait in the rotunda’s fountain longing for some liquid to spit into the sky. Viney weeds sprout from between unkempt stretches of gravel and stone tile. The adjacent forest has eaten into the once well-manicured gardens around Stökéwood, seizing back its territory. Soon, the tangled roots of the chestnut trees will spread outward in the shallow soil like desperate fingers, buckling the stone that supports the house.