The magnitude of my mistake—leaving Tai here today, to be the one who found this—guts me so hard and fast again that I taste metal. I am furious with myself, so angry that all I can do is count my breaths and wait for the medicine to kick in.

But I can’t resist the frantic pull to read, to discover Mama afresh, and so I pick it up with hot-cold hands, and can’t breathe until I reach the very last page.

It’s incomplete.

It’s incomplete; it’s incomplete; it’s incomplete, I repeat to myself, flipping through the pages of those three horrifying parts again and again, fingers itching for more. It has to be incomplete.

But I know these words are hers.

I know Mama wrote this; I know it like I know her smell, like I know the feel of her hands on my cheeks, even though they’re only fragments of memories now. It’s in the expressions, in the rhythm of her voice, in the images only she would commit to the page. She told me a fairy tale, growing up, a story about a wild fox who becomes a man’s wife, only for their relationship to sour.

I never understood what she meant. But I know now that she meant to burn it into my memory, so I would understand this was her work in this moment.

The three pieces of White Fox in my hands weave a brutal tale of men owning her, of men passing her along like a beautiful trinket, like a fragile doll. Of White Fox never gaining her independence.

I know, when she was a young actress, Mama thought of herself this way: as nothing more than a commodity. It’s what so much of the world thinks of her—the world that doesn’t know how hard my mother worked to open and run the Foix Institute, a place born from a desire for future Viloki generations to escape limiting circumstances, just like she left behind her quiet life with a difficult father on the shore.

I reject most of the world’s version of Mireille Foix Hammick: that pretty, painted shell.

But then why do the three pieces of White Fox in my hands show only her disillusionment, her depression, her fear, and her fury?

If she could be alive—if she left this for us—why not show White Fox overcoming it all?

It makes me sick.

I let my beating head fall into my hands; I try to scrape the opening image from my mind: of a woman running, running from shadows that multiply, and her captor looking through the same red purse she disappeared with. Red purse. Calfskin gloves.

It can’t be a coincidence.

Mama was telling us something.