But she stopped him, latching a hand on his forearm. Don’t treat me like a child. And the way she said it, tremulous and soft, made me scared for her.

He just scoffed. If only you were as easy to manage as a child. If only you didn’t encourage the damned obsessives to pine after you. Did you think it wise to involve yourself with that bigoted snake Daria Grendl again? All she and her kind do is stir up trouble for us.

Trouble for us? she said, dropping his arm. You mean for Hero Pharm. You sound like Nítuchí’s puppet.

I crept into Mama’s bathroom later and found her crouching around a smashed bottle of perfume, her face swollen. I couldn’t find the nerve, the words to ask her what had happened. I only asked if she and Dad were okay, and she replied by urging me onto her lap with a sigh and telling me a story about a fox who becomes a man’s wife, a story I found incomprehensible and unsettling.

So I found the tabloid later that night, in the kitchen trash can: HERO A MURDERER? KILLER RUMORS SPREAD ABOUT HERO PHARM AND ECCENTRIC FOUNDER HENRY “HËRÓ” HAMMICK.

I would find other tabloids like it, over the years, and eventually I would understand what they meant. The rumors were that the God among men’s desperation to boost Hero Pharm corporate profits resulted in the hasty formulation of faulty medicines that caused thousands of deaths, many of them on Viloxin.

But those rumors, swirling for more than a decade, only hit mainstream papers two years ago when the Hero Pharm board refused to answer fresh inquiries and in a written statement pointed to our reclusive, eccentric dad as the responsible party for any and all formerly suboptimal testing procedures. Dad was forced to step down as CEO of his brainchild, and he locked himself into Stökéwood for good.

He wouldn’t even explain what happened; just like he did after Mama disappeared, he told me not to worry about matters outside my control, and to focus on my studies.

It was Aunt Marion who filled me in. She told me his first love was his work, even when Mama was around. She told me that a colleague of his deposited me and Tai on her doorstep with a huge check, some months after Mama left (I remember that much). Dad visited once, very early on, and the visit was so deeply uncomfortable—the three of us silently eating curried lentils at Aunt Marion’s cramped kitchen table, Dad quietly criticizing us for watching endless TV instead of studying—that both Tai and I were plagued with nightmares of Mama and pitched into despair for a month afterward. Aunt Marion had words with him then, and the visits ended before they could truly begin.