At any rate, I freelanced laser-cut shelving and patio extensions. I also wrote articles. Finally, that fortuitous day arrived when I was commissioned for a profile piece by the seminal Inhabit. Helen failed to recognize me, which wasn’t demoralizing. Too cowardly to mention we had already met, I segued into her research on family estates, hoping she would reveal her past.

“I lift from gothic novels,” she said. “There’s something about the entropic vision of an ancient manor that’s both creepy and welcoming. We treat architecture how we treat our physical selves, as doomed to oblivion. No effort is spared in restoring the Sistine Chapel ceiling to its pristine éclat. A Matisse won’t go to waste. Take a Mies van der Rohe, though, and it’s given the care of a crypt. Preservation’s a Sisyphean task in this craft.”

She waxed melancholy about the replicas of Japanese and German villages fabricated from scratch in the 1940s to test the incendiary capacity of napalm. Hollywood set directors outfitted each domicile down to the details of toiletries and authentic newspapers. “Extraordinary amounts of effort for the simulacra of ghost towns that were then blown up,” Helen lamented. “Sounds about right.” Discussing books rekindled the embers of her monologue. In her office, Ernst Neufert’s handbook on ergonomic principles rests alongside The Castle of Otranto, The Woman in White, and Jane Eyre with its crazy wife in the attic. Recondite chambers and whimsical, old-timey chicanery are her fetishes. “Any shelter should also expose us. I’m a fan of that genre of literature because passages of prose describe passages through ramparts, hedge mazes, and servants’ quarters. The plot hinges on a secret in a secret room. It makes visible how the brain harbors a secret.”

Helen has her own cache of secrets. In upstate New York, on acres of rolling hills, woods, and manicured demesne, at an institution titled “the Retreat,” lives a patient named Hannah Dannenforth: her half sister. My interview had bombed. I was in the doldrums. At the end of a drive in a rental car without a working radio, largely spent feeling sorry for myself, I sat down in the Rec Center across from a woman who looked like everybody’s aunt. Where Helen was lissome, Hannah was plump; where Helen’s hair was loosely elegant, Hannah’s was tightly cropped and turfing every which way, like a lawn in severe need of mowing; where Helen entertained in haute couture, Hannah hid in stained secondhand. “Do you know why I’m stuck here with a bunch of junkies and schizophrenics and Adirondack chairs?” she asked. I said that I didn’t—sleuthing out her contact information itself had been a test of will. “I’m here,” she replied, “because I’m Lily’s real mother.”

Of course, that isn’t the reason she was committed. She kidnapped Lily, twelve years old at the time. Hannah agreed to a plea deal: years of probation on a suspended sentence, provided that she voluntarily check into a psychiatric hospital. “There’s buildings dedicated to locking up people like me for good,” she said. “I bet you don’t hear my sister talk about the architecture of the prison, of the sanatorium, do you?” She went on, “Helen blames me for Lily. When she looks at her, she sees her biggest failure. I was afraid while I was pregnant that I would birth one of those babies with microcephaly or intestines spilling out of their bodies. But after I saw her, those feelings seemed trivial. When I look at that girl, I feel proud. I think: I made her. She’s mine.”