I fought to make my voice calm and reasonable. “Mother, it’s not yours. It’s Dad’s. And you clearly don’t want it. Nor do you seem to want me—at least not as I really am. You want a Shirley Temple doll.”

“I–I want a daughter. who won’t get herself killed by some idiot. I just want. ” She trailed off, shrugging helplessly.

“Hollywood. You want glamour and movie magic. I just want to go back to my job.”

“Oh! I just don’t understand you.” She stomped her designer-clad foot. “How can you do that? It’s such an awful job.”

“Not to me,” I replied. As I said it, I felt better, because it was true and I wasn’t unsure or bewildered for the first time since I’d entered her house. “I love doing what I do and I love being the person in charge of my life.” The box was poking into my hip, but I’d be damned if I’d put it down. “When I was a kid, I wasn’t in charge of anything. Even when I went to college, I was someone’s student or someone’s girlfriend or some director’s chorus girl. Someone’s whipping girl. Someone’s doll. I was Veronica’s daughter. I wasn’t Harper Blaine.”

My mother let out a scream and lashed her fists at the box, knocking it out of my hands. “How can you say that?”

The box went down like a sack of flour, sending up a cloud of paper and small objects and the smell of dust. Grey whorls spun from it as it struck the floor, gushing its contents from split sides.

“Look what you’ve done!” Mother shouted, sweeping her arms around.

I sighed and crouched down to pick up the pieces. A piece of paper glimmered like silver and floated in the air, drifting with unearthly languor toward the ground. I reached for it, feeling the buzz of Grey before I even closed my fingers on its yellowed surface.

It was old. Twenty-two years old, in fact. The cream-colored paper was stained with splatters of brown and the writing had faded to a dirty spiderweb scrawl. “There must be no more,” it read. “I’m sorry, Harper.” It was signed “Robert.” Not “Dad,” though it was clearly him.

I felt sucker punched once again—he wrote it to me? Signed his name as if I were an adult? Why? I’d been twelve! I gaped up at my mother. Unable to say anything else, I blurted, “You kept the suicide note?”

She glanced aside and shrugged. “Everything was just shoved in a box when we moved.”

“Bullshit. The cops would have kept it with the file unless you requested it. Why did you ask for it back?” And why didn’t I remember any of it? There must have been cops around, asking questions. They must have asked why he’d apologized to me, but I had no memory of any of that. It was as if there were a yawning hole around everything connected to my father’s death, and I could not recall anything of the time or the circumstances.

My mother flapped her hands in the air, as if distancing herself physically from the sheet of paper. “I didn’t ask for that. I just wanted the property they took. When I asked, they just gave me everything.”

“The gun, too?”

She didn’t reply; she just looked away, wan faced.

I pawed through the heap the box had spilled forth, stirring and sorting until I found it: an old-school Smith & Wesson revolver. It was still in an evidence bag, gritty and smeared. No one had cleaned it off. I felt sick and swallowed bile. But the gun had no glimmer of Grey to it. It was just a dead object, less active than most. The note was Grey, but not the instrument my father had used to end his life. That was strange.

“Was this his?” I asked.

My mother shook her head and didn’t look in my eyes. “No. Rob never owned a gun that I knew of.”

So where had it come from? I had a lunatic thought and asked, “Was it yours?” My mother had grown up on a cattle ranch, after all. She’d been around guns and horses and hard men from the cradle. She’d flipped out because I had a pistol on me, but she’d been more upset that I’d brought a gun into her house than that it was a firearm per se. Was she just being a dramatic hypocrite or did she have some particular problem with the idea of guns now? Or was it me and guns?

She sighed. “Yes. It’s mine.” Her shoulders slumped as if the admission had taken something from her.

“Ah.” Once the case was determined to be a clear suicide, and not a homicide, the cops had given her the note as part of his belongings. But they’d given her the gun because it was hers.

My mother’s gun. My father’s death. And a dead boyfriend telling me it was time to figure out how it all made me what I was. Cold tripped down my spine. This just kept getting freakier.

I stared into the mess around my feet, searching for other glimmers of Grey. A general haze of silver mist lay over the pile like dry-ice fog. There was a lot of stuff to sort through, but whether any of it would present a clue or not, as a body, it already told me Dad had had something Grey going on. I’d have to find him, too, if I could. I didn’t relish the idea of hunting through the Grey, through layers of time and memory and horrors, until I found his ghost—if he had one. I shuddered.

“This room is always so chilly,” my mother said.

“What?”

“You shivered, sweetie. It’s because the room is cold.”

I let that pass. If my mother believed that, she was less canny than I’d given her credit for.

“Do you have another box I could put this stuff in? I want to sort through it at the hotel.”

“But you can do that here!”

“I’d rather take it somewhere else, out of your way,” I replied. I knew my tone was cold, but I didn’t care. Fear was creeping in and I wasn’t going to give in to it, not in front of her.

My mother frowned but surprised me by just going away to fetch another box and not arguing. Maybe she realized that it wasn’t an activity she was going to enjoy. She handed the flat-folded box to me along with a roll of tape and climbed back up on her ladder to watch while I repacked the contents of the split carton.

“You’ll bring the rest back when you’re done, won’t you?” she asked as I hefted the box up into my arms.

“Yeah. Tomorrow probably. There are a few other boxes I’d like to take a look at, if you don’t mind.”

“No, I don’t mind.” She sounded eager in spite of my frosty manner, and I supposed she was a little lonely—or just bored—during the day, while Damon was off doing whatever he did until dinnertime. I couldn’t imagine what she did all day. I knew she didn’t have a job; she lived on the proceeds of divorce and widowhood and whatever man she was clinging to at the time. Judging by her earlier comments, she saw other women as “the competition,” so I didn’t imagine she spent her days hanging out with them, lest she come off the worse by comparison.

I forced myself to unbend a bit. “Mother, what do you do all day?” I asked as she followed me back up the stairs.

“What do you mean, sweetie?”

“What I said. What do you do all day? You don’t work; you don’t cook and clean—or you never did after Dad died. How do you kill the time all day?”

“I play golf. I go to my yoga class. I shop. That sort of thing.”

I don’t know why her reply surprised me, but it did. “You don’t dance anymore? At all?”

“Oh, no, not other than socially. It’s just too painful to see all those skinny little girls prancing around the studio like dogs in heat.”

Another exasperated sigh escaped me. You just couldn’t win with my mother: you were either too fat to be pretty or too pretty to be borne. The philosophical aspects of yoga seemed not to have taken root in her angry little soul. Had she always been like that? I thought so, but I was not objective.

We walked up to the carport, and I put the box into the backseat of my rental car. I turned back to look at my mother, feeling strange at how much larger I was than this diminutive tyrant of my childhood.

“I’ll bring these back tomorrow, if you want them.”

“Of course, sweetie!”