I’m afraid. Anxious, really. I can feel the coppery anxiety bubbling up from my gut and into the back of my throat, and I instantly feel a crawling urge to whip out my notebook and write through my thoughts until they subside. I couldn’t relax on the flight, much less write or read a single page. I spent the whole time thumbing through the lavender notebook Aunt Marion gave me, where I’d scrawled a list of all the places I remember from childhood in Limatra and Noxim, the town by Stökéwood. To write my book about Mama—the book that will snap back at the world’s view that she was just some dressed-up, made-up doll, the book that will show she ached and raged and loved—I need to visit these places again and log every memory of her. That’s how I’ll get to know my mother again: not by wallowing in the soul-sucking mystery of her disappearance, but by carefully exploring the many sides of her life.

Tai doesn’t know.

We find the spare set of keys behind the withered, potted gardenia plants by the front, as promised by Uncle Teddy’s assistant. The lock on the smaller wooden side door by the kitchen doesn’t seem to match any of the heavy iron keys, so we try the massive, intricate wrought iron front door (modeled after Rodin’s The Gates of Hell), which opens after much fumbling and a heavy-handed push. Tai switches into dusty sheepskin slippers in the shallow entrance, padding forward, and I follow suit, shivering as my feet slick in the dust.

“Hello?” she calls.

My eyes adjust to the dark. The entryway feels like an otherworldly cathedral, but it looks almost as I imagined it: walls of costly, imported marble reaching as high as the eye can see, studded with sconces, long-gone dark; the grand wooden staircase that once led up to our bedrooms but leads nowhere now, on account of the moth-eaten velvet rope threaded across its mouth; a heavy oak table, where Mama once placed five-foot-tall arrangements of flowering branches, lavender, and other wildflowers, bare now.

What’s most different is that the house beyond it … looks like a maze.

Its vaulted, awe-inspiring vastness is punctuated by gargantuan stacks of old paperwork on the ground—uneven paper stalagmites, blocking the way in and out.

I don’t dare to pick them up and read them.

In the year before Mama disappeared, I spied on my parents in this very hall from the top of the stairs. What am I to make of this? Mama asked him, holding up a tabloid I couldn’t read—recognizable only from its flashy, bright colors, and its big font. Mama always told us tabloids were rubbish when we passed them at newsstands.

It’s nonsense, Mireille, and you should know better than to believe it, Dad replied, moving to leave, and I thought the matter settled.