That Lily was missing turned out to be a revelation to Helen. She was overseas in Beijing, supervising the foundation pour for her labyrinthine concert hall, cochlear like an ear (“too literal,” said its detractors) with a tympanic, abalone outer shell. What must Lily have made of such a design? If she saw it as her mother mocking her, she had reason to rebel. Those mandated with her care had been strategically confused as to the girl’s whereabouts: the housekeeper believed her to be staying with a friend, her driver that she was off with family, which was, of course, accurate. When Lily phoned from Nevada, complaining that Hannah had kidnapped her and how much it sucked, Helen alerted law enforcement and didn’t bother to buy a plane ticket. She was needed at the site. “Lily betrayed me,” Hannah said, but if life is occasionally interesting in anecdote, it’s not in the actual living, and she was worn down by forgiveness. After all, Lily was a child, and children are still subject to the whims of their boredoms. “Why do we have children? I kept asking myself that question. We can’t protect them—not with our infrastructures, our technology, our culture. They’re going to die. They’re also going to intentionally and unintentionally hurt each other. It’s selfish to have children.”

Strangulation as indicated by a fractured hyoid was the cause of my mother’s death. She had been raped. The coroner folded open her skin like a map, emptied the cadaver—or rather, the body of evidence that was my mother—of parts, and stitched her shut with a sailmaker’s needle, while painstakingly recording the bruises, the cuts and abrasions, the vaginal swelling into a microphone. I related to what Hannah was saying about procreation, though what were those of us who were already alive to do? “Love,” she said. “Love as much as you can. Lily may not feel my love yet, but she will. I even love Helen.” She seemed to have been oversaturated with therapy. Platitudes were for pharmacies and embroidery. Still, the truth is that love doesn’t vanish. When you love, she postulated, it stays with the beloved for life, passes into those they love, and unspools through the universe, expanding with it into eternity.

I wanted to believe that my mother had loved me and would have continued to do so, but I didn’t feel her love. If I searched for it enough, perhaps I would find that emotional inheritance, hidden somewhere inside myself like an appendix, an organ I didn’t know was there, or why I needed it, until it ruptured. Is that the reason, during my drive back to the city in the saddest rental car on earth, why I fantasized about every tiny detail of that miserable Hannah-Lily odyssey? I wasn’t sure what I was writing anymore, as certainly my editors at the glossy coffee-table magazine wouldn’t publish this mess of an article and risk pissing off a starchitect like Dannenforth, one of the most powerful among the elite set awarded that portmanteau. The interview would have to serve as another bit of paper I crumpled up or tore apart and added to the model of my mother—perhaps, after this piece, that nest would finally be complete, and, just as I had been able to do with her before she was killed, I could curl up inside of it and be nurtured.