But we’re already disappearing down the street, both of us crying for different reasons, Tai ripping the wig off her head with starry-hot eyes and whispering, She’s alive, I knew she’s alive; she’s alive, I knew she’s alive, and my throat burning with fury that I could be so foolish, that I could think anyone would give us answers without trying to use us, that I could be so desperate to believe any voice but the one that feels like it comes from my gut, the frightened one repeating over and over, She’s dead, she’s dead, she’s dead.

I will avoid the block with that psychic’s shop, taking meandering detours that add minutes to my walk, for the next four years.

But as it turns out, the psychic was right.

My little sister Tai and I will find our mama, the woman once known as Mireille Foix Hammick, a decade after she disappeared. After ten years—ten long years spent wandering that purgatory of uncertain loss—it will take only one week to solve our mystery. One week of madness, brilliance, deception, trust, weakness, strength, abandonment, love, and sacrifice in the belly of our birth town, Limatra, and the fringing forest of delirium to its west.

Not everyone will survive this week.

But just as every story comes to an end, it must also start at the beginning.…

NONI

NEW YORK, 2018

“But I’m Mireille Foix’s daughter,” I speak into the cold air, watching my breath cloud and vanish.

My cheeks flush as the words stick in my throat. This is the worst kind of introduction. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve used this excuse—but I’m her daughter—to get my way. I’m not Tai. My sister breathes I’m her daughter. Not me.

The hulking god of a man—bare forearms rivered with veins, even in the cold—stares down at me, shivering in my too-small leather jacket and Mama’s old patched Jordache jeans. We’re standing in front of a bar; specifically, its ivy-draped underground entrance in a West Village town house, blocks from where I’ve lived with Tai and Aunt Marion since I was eight years old. Right next to the psychic’s shop, her storefront even more run-down and overgrown than before.

The bouncer shakes his bald head, egg-shiny in the amber streetlamp light. “And I’m telling you right now, you’re not Mireille Foix’s daughter.”

I’m not going to say it doesn’t hurt, being told I’m not her daughter, but I deserve it. I deserve to feel uncomfortable for trying so hard to fit in with the too-cool girls at my school for the first time, months before graduation. You’re seriously coming out with us? they said, smiling with matte maroon lips, slinging their moms’ beat-up black Hermès Kelly bags over their own forearms, snappable freckled twigs.