“You realize that’s a look just made for the perverts who gather at all these events?” Noni says to me, as she slides on the simple black shift she picked from the pile I preapproved for her.

“Agree to disagree, Manon. This,” I say, smoothing the skirt, “is the kind of killer look that has the power to draw Mama back out.” That could show her just how well I am. I point at the strappy water-blue confection I wanted for Noni. “It’s not too late for you to join me.”

Manon snorts to herself. “That’s okay. I don’t need to sate the obsessives’ hunger with my appearance.”

On our way out, I make Noni take three dozen photos of me draped across the Stökéwood stairwell, the general aesthetic being elegant neo-neo-Gothic vampire murder victim—I don’t understand how you can say things like that with a smile, she says, frowning—and in the car, we pour ourselves the fancy champagne I find chilled in a cellophane bag in the backseat, tied with a note reading, Cheers to Mireille! Never have I been more delighted that the drinking age in Viloxin is a very loose eighteen. I want to drink away our date with Daria. I want to overload the gaping maw of you didn’t know her in the pit of my stomach, with champagne bubbles.

“Absurdly creepy to phrase it like she’s alive and this is a celebration with her. It’s almost like they saw Dad’s note,” I say, as the fizz comes out of my nose. I’m downing it fast, too fast. I need that looseness in my bones.

“Mm, because the magazine definitely thinks she’s planning a triumphant return tonight,” Nons says, rolling her eyes. She hasn’t stopped clutching the purse I lent her, with her grody chewed-up fingernails.

I smile drily. But a part of me hopes—even prays—Mama will come back tonight, just like Daria said.

But that’s only because I crave any kind of reunion with her, even if it’s an ugly reintroduction to her family after ten long years at a ten-thousand-euro-per-head screening (ten thousand euro!) with hundreds of our least intimate acquaintances. Who the hell are you, Lady? Where the hell did you go?

“What do you think the big surprise is?” Noni asks me, watching trees fly past the window.

“Um, a lock of her hair.” I count on my fingers. “Archival videos of her taking a shower. An old blood sample proving she’s really Lady Fleischman, from Elizabeth, New Jersey.” I watch Noni bite her lip, eating off the lipstick I painstakingly applied.