Skipping down the hall with her, hand in hand, my head still warm from where her fingers wove a French braid into my scalp. Napping together in the library—running my finger over the seam on her face made by the blanket we shared.

Mama, swiftly layering cream-colored makeup that smells of paint onto the fine, freckled skin of her chest with a blank stare into the mirror, until she glimpses me rounding the bend and drops the tube on the counter, her face cracking into a toothy, grateful smile, swirling around to hug me, kiss me, wrap me in her small arms in such a way that they felt more welcoming and generous than a cocoon.

And waking up that second morning after her disappearance, only to crumple by this very door in my sweated-through striped pajamas, hit by flashes of understanding all of that might just be gone forever.

I knock over one stack of paperwork, scattering the top sheets, and I pick them up with unsteady hands, squinting at the photo-copied text. Old documents eaten around the edges, section titles in bold beneath the retired Hero Pharm logo.

MEDICATION NAME

TRIAL #

DATE

RESULTS

I drop it like it’s singed me. I don’t need to be Dad to understand what he was collecting.

It’s a paper cemetery for the victims of his experiments over a multi-decade career. Tests gone wrong, side effects found too late. The man who told me to spend my life creating something greater than myself was living inside a cemetery of his mistakes.

Maybe neither of my parents were who I thought they were.

I find my way through the maze and to the front door before Tai can intercept me, heart pumping the blackest blood, and I break into a run to meet the car that dropped us off. It’s still waiting outside the front gates, as promised, to take me to the city apartment in Limatra.

Tai can enjoy her reunion with this broken place, with her so-called happy memories, barbed things doomed to hurt us. She’ll manage, by texting Saxim and Linos and the hundreds of vapid people in her orbit.

Tomí salutes me from the window of the guardhouse. I swallow hard, desperate to ignore the regret building in my chest—you shouldn’t leave Tai alone, don’t leave Tai alone—but … she thinks she’s an adult, right?

And she knows where to find me.

As the fields and forests outside grow sparser and interspersed with more neon-lit buildings and parking lots, the buzzing in my skull subsides, and I let my shoulders fall and my eyelids droop.

I have secrets, too, Mama. I know how they nourish and how they nip. Help me understand yours.

Just don’t make me go back there.

BOY

Live Video—THAÏS 12 months ago—Oh My G*d I Found a Stökéwood Home Video!!!

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