I want to say their jabs are as manageable as the bad comments I get on my posts. Except these don’t come from lonely kids sitting in their bedrooms alone, emboldened by distance and the privacy of the screen. These come from functional adults, a breath away, who must have known Mama. Who know us.

And every single time they speak ill of her, I kind of feel like they’re pushing her away from this place, jinxing her return.

“I bet she discovered some ghastly Hero Pharm secret,” I hear whispered behind me, by a rail-thin man who chuckles and swirls ice around the well of his drink. I recognize him as one of Nítuchí’s old assistants at Hero Pharm.

Every single one of my muscles tenses.

“I think they decided to hush her up,” he continues. “Threw her body into cryogenic preservation. Maybe they’ll defrost her in fifty years, when it won’t cause a scandal. We’ll squeeze another few movies out of her yet.”

The image of my mother pushed into a glorified fast-food meat freezer is enough for me to turn to face him. “Are you a film producer now? How thrilling,” I snap in Vilosh, Noni stumbling after me.

The others around him scatter. He blushes before saying something polite yet dismissive in rapid Vilosh.

I hurry toward the bar, Noni trying to stop me, but I’m temporarily blind to all else but its gleaming row of bottles. Beautiful, beautiful bottles. The bartender pours us each a slug of sweet wine with pinched lips, his eyes traveling from our faces to the gossips behind us. I let the wine’s warmth bathe my mouth, then my insides, as I feel them watching me. The wine is as warm as a mother’s touch, I think.

“They’re such pretty young lambs, perhaps they shouldn’t be hitting the bottle too hard,” says a voice, behind me on my left. “We wouldn’t want another Mireille on our hands.” He chuckles. “Then again, I suppose it’s fated. You can tell it’s in her blood, from the way the taller one dressed like a tart.”

I cough out an icy chunk.

So that’s all they wanted.

Us.

Here, in the lushly decorated plastic Eden the magazine created, these people who brushed shoulders with Mama and Dad want some tragically splashy performance on our part to liven the return of Hëró and Mireille Hammick’s children to Viloki society. Something to express our lack of reliability and sanity as a family.