“First thing tomorrow morning,” I say, teeth chattering with adrenalized fury and—He knows? How can he know? How could he hide this from us? How could he? He’s opening his mouth to reply when a bell rings, because fortune favors Teddy Hammick.

“Last call,” announces a too-loud usher, ringing a second bell, and then the three of us are corralled into the theater, just as the Oscar-winning director of those ten movies whose name I always forget says, onstage, “Please know that immediately after this lost magazine promotional footage was discovered in the late video director’s home archives, it was handed into the authorities as well as Mireille’s family.”

The crowd titters, and the dense waves of brittle admirers part before us as Tai whispers to me, “But that’s … us.”

I hold firm on to her hand, my palm inching toward her wrist, my eyes trained on the chasm of black behind the sneakered director in his tux.

And then the screen crackles to life, and she’s there, above us, ten times our size.

I gasp.

Mama.

At first, it’s the fleeting shot of her face that gets me: ghostly, perfect, the bones arranged in such a way that only Nature herself could be responsible for crafting her. Mireille Foix possesses Grace Kelly’s elegance crossed with Audrey Hepburn’s mischievousness, Katharine Hepburn’s wit, and Marilyn Monroe’s pure, languid sex.

Then it’s in the way she moves: in the elegant snap of her doelike neck as she looks both ways crossing the street, in the upward flick of her manicured little finger as her hand moves through the air, in her gait—that waifish float that’s impossible to imitate, and God knows I’ve tried. The effortless insouciance of it all.

And then it’s in the Hermès scarf wrapped around her head: a classic pattern, a favored chain-link-and-saddle silk number, with … something on the corner, flapping in the wind. Her monogram, MFH.

“It’s May 24, 2009,” she says aloud, in her rasping lilt, and a gasp ripples through the audience. The morning of the night she disappeared. “We’re in the town of Limatra, shopping for my daughters.” She turns to the camera and smiles, with freckled cheeks and full lips. A loose wisp of chestnut hair brushes her neck. “Manon and Thaïs love these chocolates that I used to bring them from Belgium. But they’ve just opened an outpost right here on Viloxin. Let’s buy them two—or twenty—special boxes as a surprise, shall we?” She drifts up the steps of a small shop, the hem of her dress catching in the wind, then stops midway, as if she’s changed her mind. She waits there, on her tippy-toes, and a murmur runs through the crowd.

Just then, she looks over her shoulder, lowers her glasses, and winks at the camera. “Does that work?” she asks us.