I bump into a stack of paper, and it topples, falling to the ground. Mina scritches toward me, the beeping coming from her stomach.

“Mina, where’s Tai?” I ask, steadying myself on the oak entry table, empty no more. Someone has moved a stack of paper there: I squint at it in the dark to see if it’s a message from Tai.

“Thaïs hasn’t been here all day,” Mina replies, the sunset on her panel blinking ominously. “Manon, Boy left those letters for you. I was just about to charge, but perhaps I can make you a cup of tea later?”

“Who’s Boy?” I ask, recognizing an angry scrawl on the top page. Cold sweat trickles down my neck.

I know the answer already. I know it, in the rushing blackness at the very bottom of the river pit of me.

“Who’s Boy?” Mina echoes, senselessly. Her head turns with a plasticky scratch. “Are you feeling fine, Manon? Your heart rate is elevated.”

“Go charge, Mina,” I tell her, trembling.

Coppery doom rushes at me, rolling fast, just for standing inside the house. I run out the door and sit down on the driveway in the open air, in the one patch of cell service. I use my phone’s flashlight to read the short note scribbled on the top page.

Hello, girls. I’ve been watching you both for so long. Years now, electronically and otherwise. I see how you frustrate each other. How you don’t mix—oil and water. Foolish. You need each other. I watched your mother take you each to different private spots. The library office. The tower in the sky. She left different pieces of herself in each of you. You’ll never make sense of who she is alone.

Let me help you.

Brando

My fingers sweat onto the page. I skim the other letters: midnight dark, clipped, strange. Full of something akin to love gone sour—resentment, obsession, fear. A breath away from hate. Our cousin.

One of the boys.

I’m trembling too hard to know what I’m afraid of most.

That’s when the headlights of a car sweep past me in the dark, searing my eyeballs, and I scrabble back on the gravel with my abraded hands, the pain jolting through my arms.

It’s a taxi, pulling in next to the car.

I hide behind a bush until two familiar tousled heads poke out of the back door. I run, panting, toward the gap beside the gatepost, squeezing and scraping through.

I wrap my arms around Tai more tightly than I ever have. She smells like vomit and honey.