It lingered, a musty, decaying taste on my tongue.

 Hey Aarav,

 Sorry about this. I just can’t do it anymore. Everything hurts.

 Don’t add this to the guilt you carry about your mother’s disappearance. You could do nothing then and you can’t do anything now. This is my choice and I’m deliberately making it while you’re away at your book festival, so you’ll know this wasn’t a cry for help. I don’t want to be saved. I’m ready to go.

 But I hope for better for you. I hope you find peace.

 Love always,

 Paige

Her words echoed again and again inside my head as I sat on Piha Beach an hour and a half later. Paige had loved Piha’s black sands, the crashing ocean a siren song she could never ignore.

“Let’s buy a place above Piha.” Her green eyes clear and bright and her short hair sticking up every which way as she turned to look at me in bed. “With a big balcony so I can sit there and listen to the ocean.”

She’d jumped three days later.

And in the waves now danced two ghosts.

I didn’t know how long I watched them laugh and spin and call out to me, but the sun had long dropped from its highest point by the time I went back to my car and restarted the engine.

I’d parked on a grassy verge, cars spread out sporadically along the long stretch of ocean. Three surfers, sleek as seals in their wetsuits, were loading their surfboards onto the vehicle closest to me, their hair still wet and their laughs holding that delighted edge that only comes with a rush of endorphins—or adrenaline.

I hadn’t laughed that way since I was a child.

Putting the car into reverse gear, I pulled out, then headed toward my father’s home, my head a mess. Paige was dead. I’d hallucinated her.

The thought was a reminder to write down anything of which I was certain before the knowledge got confused and broken. After pulling over near a closed track into the regional park, I took out my notebook and read over all my notes prior to today.

My pulse began to calm the further I got into the book. I remembered all of this, though a few of the memories were admittedly fuzzy at the edges.

Then I hit something about two pages from the end. The writing was jagged, as if done in a great rush. It said:

 Dad’s secretary. In the Cul-de-Sac that night. Wanted to be next Mrs. Rai.

My breath came in jerky bursts. I had no memory of making that entry on the bottom half of the page.

Could someone else have gained access to my notebook?

Yes, but it wasn’t a reasonable possibility. The most logical explanation was that I’d scrawled the note while my brain was acting up. The question was, were the words true? All these years and I’d never once thought about the woman my father had been screwing at the time.

No, wait. I had thought about her. It’d been during my conversation with Neri and Regan. That’s when I must’ve scrawled this. Since I’d also hallucinated Paige the same day, the fact that I’d totally forgotten doing it wasn’t exactly a surprise.

The problem was, I couldn’t remember the full details of that conversation with the police. I wet my lips, thought hard, but the memory was hazy. My breath came in small puffs, perspiration breaking out over my skin. Whatever was happening to my brain, it was getting worse. I had to figure this out before I couldn’t.

“Think, Aarav,” I muttered. “The secretary.”

I’d never paid much attention to her because I’d known how my father viewed her—as a momentary indulgence, nothing serious. But clearly, something about her had sent up a red flag after a decade. I had to unravel that thread again by following the bread crumbs my past self had left for me.

Though from the force of the handwriting on the page—the pen having gone through the page in places—I’d been in a manic or excited state when I’d uncovered the information. Drinking down a bottle of water I’d bought from the service station when I filled up the tank on the way to Piha, I brushed back the mental whisper that I was losing it, seriously going nuts.

Instead of returning to the Cul-de-Sac, I drove all the way back to my city apartment.

Once inside, I went again to the safe in my study. It held photo albums, the precious originals of all the images of my mother I’d scanned. This, handling them physically, felt far easier, far more real, than going through the scans.

A small part of me hoped that maybe, because they were physical, I’d remember better.

Happy memories of childhood appeared page by page.

The trip to the beach when my mother had worn that yellow halter-neck swimsuit and huge sunglasses, the picture of glamour. I’d never thought about how it must’ve been for her when she first arrived in this country from her traditional and conservative village. Had she always fought against the strictures and been eager to throw off the trappings? Or had my father had to persuade her into her first swimsuit?

I couldn’t quite imagine the latter, but I remembered her saying, “If he’d stayed the asshole I married, we might’ve been happy. Unfortunately, he decided to up the asshole ante.” She’d been drunk then, a dramatic sylph in a red-sequined gown draped on a chaise longue, while I sat in an office chair I’d rolled in from my father’s study.

He’d been away for the month, off on a business trip to Europe.

Looking back, I accepted she shouldn’t have been talking about that kind of thing with her son, but that month had been the happiest of my childhood. I’d been wearing a tuxedo that night—she’d taken me along as her date to some fancy do—but the rest of that month, we’d done things like make the three-hour drive to Rotorua just to go on the luge.

Both of us had hammed it up in a selfie we’d taken before we got into the little one-person carts and careened down the winding track.