She might have left a message there for me. Where she knew only I—not Dad, not Manon—could find it.

So, as soon as Manon ditches me—as I suspected she would—I blast disco music saved on my phone and I slink around the stacks of moldy paperwork and make my way up the creaking grand staircase, past the moth-eaten velvet rope used to keep visitors away. It’s actually cleaner than I thought, besides the nasty plate of withered fruit in the hallway and an actual shag carpet’s worth of dust. The electricity works, even if some of the bulbs flicker. What’s spookier is that the upstairs furniture has been sold off, but you can see the stained divots in the carpet, where the legs stood. My empty bedroom has been repainted asylum white, and everything in Noni’s bedroom has been replaced with just two crisp white cots that could probably only fit me with my arms folded over my chest like a mummy. I find an old Spirited Away poster of Noni’s rolled up in her closet, next to a useless, yellowed wall calendar with horrible, off-kilter drawings of old Viloki castles from 1988. Stökéwood is Miss December. Blasting ABBA, I prop both against the wall for pizazz, before edging toward Mama and Dad’s bedroom.

The door is stuck—not locked, I don’t think, but jammed—which sends a shivery ache through me. It also smells like a small animal died from starvation in the vents while watching endless seasons of Love Island. I raise the music’s volume to keep the wrong kind of ghosts away.

The good news is, I can still access Mama’s closet because it has a separate entrance on the floor. That’s how big-ass it was. Most of its once-sparkling contents have been stripped away and auctioned off, but I can actually smell lavender in the cedar corners if I close my eyes. I find the secret cabinet that seamlessly blends into the wood, and it clicks open softly, revealing a couple of halfway-decent vintage pieces, forgotten for all these years. They probably need major dry cleaning, but I still spend too long running my fingers over their intricate beading and imagining that maybe she was the last person to touch one of them.

Then, with the feel of those nubs still imprinted on my hands, I push through to her private bathroom for the first time in a decade.