“Don’t talk down to me. I know all of that. I know.” She releases her knees and presses clenched fists to her eyelids before looking up at me, her whole face brimming with that secret hope that’s so tender and naive it makes me sick. “Stop staring at me.”

“I’m not.” But of course I am. She’s beautiful even when she’s upset—with her feline, heart-shaped face, her baby-pink cheeks with their cherubic gleam, her puffy lips, and her oversize eyes—and that irritates me. Sometimes pain just shouldn’t be beautiful. But it’s more than that, of course: Everything about Tai annoys me now. Her hundreds of thousands of followers, and the fact she’s almost always putting on a show for them. It makes me half expect that she’s livestreaming this moment right now. I remain on edge with her—on the offensive, as always. “I’m leaving Stökéwood, and I’m not coming back,” I decide. “And you’re coming with me. We’re staying at the apartment in Limatra. I already made sure it’s habitable. This is done.”

I open my eyes, finding her blue ones set on me, sparkling with a sharpness I haven’t seen in months: She has an idea, and that idea is all that matters.

I know it’s the idea that our father just planted in her head, ready to sprout and grow thorns.

“This is bigger than you and me,” she says, staring me down. “Even if she isn’t alive, he believed someone might be responsible for what happened.”

And that thought sickens me. Of course it does. It took years of excruciating work to sit with my belief that she killed herself. And now, because of one letter, I can’t tear the image of Mama, bruised and battered, from my mind. It’s an amalgamation of her own movie clips, lines pulled from the tabloid report on White Fox, and my own imagination overheating. My pulse has run off; my skin is feverish. Of course someone malicious could have forced her to disappear, could have locked her up for ten long years, could have led Dad to believe she might still be out there, eager to return. It’s horrible, it’s nonsensical, and it’s all I want to believe.

“We can’t be here right now,” I whisper. I wanted to feel close to Mama again, but I wanted to do it on my terms.

“What if she found something out about Hero Pharm and they fucked her up?” Tai says, talking over me. “Imagine what she might have uncovered. Imagine what she might have left as clues in White Fox.”

My eyes flick to hers, then away. Tai, the expert manipulator. I know some of the men at Hero Pharm are bastards. But Dad was their leader. He was meant to know everything—to be responsible.