I thrust my bloodied hand into my pocket. “Why aren’t you listening to me? White Fox disappeared with her. And to look for her, we don’t have to stay here. You can be so thickheaded—”

“This is my home, Manon. I’ve only been on the grounds for ten minutes in the past decade, and pretty soon it’s going to be sold off. If Aunt Marion hadn’t refused to let us come to Stökéwood for Dad’s funeral, we would’ve gotten this note sooner. But now it’s been ten months since he left that note for us, even longer since he saw her, and every day that passes takes us further from her. Makes it more difficult for us to…” She rubs her eyes. “Sense her.”

I stare at her in front of me, sparrow small with her plane-matted black hair, and the edges of my coldness melt. I’m unable or unwilling to tell her that’s not how time and space work.

Because I get it: When a mother supposedly reappears, after ten long years away, surely her children should feel her warm presence, no matter how near or far, pulsing like a newly born star.

I don’t feel that.

“I’m not leaving,” she says abruptly, eyes ablaze, “and you can’t make me change my mind. I’m going to spend the night in this very, very special place where we made so many happy memories. I’m going to find White Fox.” She rises with a crack of her knees and storms toward the bathroom. “And tomorrow, I’m going to find Mama, because I know she’s still here.”

As if it’s as easy as that. As if we’re not going to find so much pain in our search, too much to bear.

Mama.

I walk the hall I walked countless times as a child, and I’m flooded by images of her, my chest filling with a choking glue.

Tai’s right: The Mama I knew is here, in a way, trapped in every stone of this place where good goes to die.

Coocoo! she croons, crouching to tickle me under the chin and read alongside me after she catches me poring over D’Aulaires’ Greek myths, pressed up against those very stones—even if it means less time at cocktails with the adults, even if it means smudging her lipstick and mussing the hem of her silk dress. Better to look lived-in, she says when Dad tuts at her.

The long meals in the dining room, just down there, where we sit in matching silk pajamas to learn to enjoy smoked Viloki sheep cheese and scallops and rock snails, where a shell slips the grasp of my tongs, flying straight at Dad’s face, and we all howl and double over with laughter, even him.