Yes, White Fox. I very much appreciate that this script has wreaked havoc on our lives since portions were leaked to the media those years ago, while you were in America. As the script was lost with your mother, I thought it was best to tell you, as children, that it never existed. That the document leaked to the media was false. Why sully the memory of your mother by speaking about a lost and incomplete nightmare of a text? But the situation has changed, and I now believe every fragment of White Fox held clues only you two can decode. She once mentioned to me that the script was, at least partially, “a map for my two girls to better understand me, once they are grown.”

This brings me back to the beginning: What exactly is this favor that I ask of you now, my daughters?

I ask that you find your mother.

I pause, fingers trembling too hard to read on.

“Manon!” Tai tears the pages from my grip as spots sparkle and fade in my vision. She reads on as I focus on my breath.

She is living on Viloxin, though she is drastically changed from the woman we knew.

Tai’s voice shakes. “What the fuck?” She looks at me, eyelashes fawn-wet. “She’s alive? I knew it. I fu—”

“Keep reading,” I urge.

Here is my truth: I saw her with my own two eyes in this very forest, one month before writing this letter. I think she wishes to contact us but cannot find the right way. I am certain she does not live on the property, for I and my team have searched every inch of this place since, and we would have found her. Unless, of course, she does not wish to be found by me.

I hope you can find her, and I hope you can accomplish what I could not, in these past nine years. I hope you can determine what happened to your beloved mother on and after that fateful night of her disappearance. What she discovered, where she went, and why. I cannot, with any certainty, tell you if she ran away or was kidnapped. I have myself cycled through those and far more punishing possibilities over the years.

But I know now she did not want to leave us forever.

Tai pauses, eyes refilling with tears, and looks at me.

I encourage her with a nod, a painful lump caught in my throat.