My own mother died when I was in college — I’ll come back to my mother, because she turns out to be the hinge of this whole nightmare, but for now it’s enough to say that losing her young left a mother-shaped hole in me that Mireille had seemed, for a decade, to fill.
So I had folded her into my life without reservation.
I paid for her specialists and her monthly medications and her long trips home to Phoenix.
I gave her an allowance for whatever she wanted.
She picked Elspeth up from school and cooked our family dinners, and every single morning, without fail, she made me a mug of chamomile tea and set it in front of me with a smile I had spent ten years reading as pure maternal love.
“Drink it while it’s warm, Ondine,” she always said.