I do a double take when we reach the correct number. The house in front of us is painted crisp white, with too-sweet seashells and mini-ature anchors adorning it: a beach cottage plucked from a movie, or—

“What the fuck, she stole Mama’s childhood home,” Tai whispers to me, shivering in the clouded patch of shade that has drifted over us. We’ve never visited the seaside house where Mama grew up—it was destroyed in a storm when she was in her twenties, and the “dangerous” nearby seaside town famously ceased to exist in the seventies, when Hero Pharm bought up the land to turn it into a nature preserve—but we saw Mama’s watercolor painting of it, the one that hung in her office, and the single grainy photo of her next to the cottage in a bikini.

Daria Grendl must have seen it, too.

I cough to try to clear the unease bobbing in my throat. It’s too late to retreat. I ring the doorbell.

An eerily familiar red-haired woman in a silk robe-dress opens the door. She processes us with a left-right flicker of her large wide-set eyes, and my hands curl into fists before I can stop myself. It’s her: Daria Grendl, the villainess, the woman we loved to hate as children, because she took any opportunity to flash the precious nuggets she’d stolen from her time with Mama.

Daria tucks the pen in her right hand behind her ear, then she ever so slowly places said hand on her cheek and shakes her head in faux admiration. That’s when I notice her skin’s not quite right—because she’s wearing pale pink gloves, so similar to the ones Mama took with her.

I don’t dare look at Tai, whose blue eyes are probably burning through my skull. What the fuck? I can almost hear her hiss, over the thrumming in my head that this was a mistake, a mistake, a—

“Look at this. Two of you … Aren’t I lucky?” Daria’s mouth curls into a broad yet off-kilter smile. She doesn’t move to open the door for us. I hear grainy voices talking over each other on a television inside. “I’m Daria, of course. You both would’ve been so little when your mother and I were working together in our prime. Or maybe you weren’t even born? Come in, come in,” she says, only drawing the door open enough for us to squeeze past her, her gaze still hot on us like she’s a furrier and we’re rare lynxes at the zoo. “Do you like my home?”