And Mama: She used to take me up the ladder to the tower hidden in her bathroom, to the nest with the view of the forest that was only ours.

I was her special baby girl, and this was our special place.

She would wrap me in a cozy blanket, and cuddle me, and read to me from books like The Twenty-One Balloons, which she stored in a metal box, covered in foil animal stickers I had insisted we buy from this airport kiosk in Frankfurt.

The secret grew when she left. I knew she might have left a message for me there, but the room was locked and closed so that no one could enter. I couldn’t tell Dad or Nons, because it was our secret place. Ours alone, and telling them would ruin it.

And I wanted to be the one who found her message, anyway.

I planned a lot in secret, in the days after she left. I was so goddamn industrious. I planned how to break into her bathroom (a set of master keys from Dad’s Stökéwood office, where he slept most nights). I planned how to reach the rope coiling down from the ceiling (a step stool), and I planned how to pull and hold the attached ladder down (a hand weight from the creepy old home gym).

I put my plan into action, one rainy night, when Noni was curled on her side in bed, refusing to speak to me, and Dad was talking to Uncle Teddy downstairs.

Reaching the magazine box at last, I shut my eyes as I placed my fingers around the rusted latch.

It opened easily.

But it was … empty.

I scrabbled around the bottom, sure I was missing a compartment, and I knocked the flashlight off the ledge with my elbow. The jolt of it hitting the marble floor below broke me into sobs, thick, hot, wet tears that streamed out of me because I no longer cared if I was found. My hunch, the one I had so carefully tended, was wrong.

Mama had left me nothing.

It was one of the students from the institute—a part-time assistant to the family—who found me crying up there. In those days, they helped Dad with us, with everything, and he called them all Boy, which I recognize now was colossally fucked. This young guy helped me down, and I made him swear on his life he wouldn’t tell anyone about the secret tower. He shrugged, probably thinking I was just some silly kid, and ruffled my hair before helping me off to bed.

The whole experience rattled me. I never snuck back into her bathroom again, at least not before we were shipped off to the States.

But if Dad did see Mama, and she had been back to Stökéwood since …