“You’d been drinking.” My voice is sterner than I expected. I don’t soften it. “You were drunk.”

“I’m sorry.” She speaks the words automatically, the syllables nearly worn out from thirty years of utterance.

“The moment I realized I couldn’t find you,” she says. “When I’d been all around the park, calling your name over and over, and you still weren’t coming . . . I knew. I knew immediately the worst had happened.”

“Vero just wanted to play with dolls,” I murmur. I’ve switched to third person. I can’t help myself. I don’t know how to tell the story any other way. For too many years, Vero has been a little girl inside my head, one prone to shedding her skin in times of distress. Even knowing she is me, or I am her . . . It feels too surreal. Vero is Vero. I’m just a gatekeeper. I know things because she tells me things. A way of disassociating myself from the horror, I guess, a quirk of coping. But it has worked for so long, I don’t know how to magically undo it now. Even sitting face-to-face with this woman—my mother, I keep telling myself—feels strange. She is Vero’s mom, I think. I’ve always wanted to meet her. But my mom . . .

I’m just not ready for that.

“Vero followed the girl away from the park,” I continue now. “But Madame was waiting for her. A stab of the needle, a quick shove into the car. By the time you missed her, Vero was already gone.”

Marlene’s fingers dig into the edge of the mattress. But she nods. I’m not telling her anything she hasn’t already imagined over the years.

“I tried so hard to find you,” she assures me now. If my use of third person bothers her, she doesn’t show it. “I answered all the police’s questions, went around to the neighbors. I was sure it was only a matter of time. They’d find you wandering down the street. Maybe you’d followed a stray dog or an ice cream truck, who knew? But the police were on it; even all the locals turned out to search. You were mine, but after you were lost, you became everyone’s. Except we still couldn’t bring you home.”

“Madame Sade took Vero to a house,” I tell her. “A beautiful mansion where Vero was given a room fit for a princess. Soft bed, beautiful hand-painted rose mural. Her very own china tea set.”

“The first few days, I didn’t drink a drop,” Marlene murmurs. “I was sober. Stone-cold for the first time in a decade. No sleeping, no drinking, no eating. I waited. I waited, waited, waited, because at any moment, the phone would ring, and it would be the police returning you to me.”

“Madame gave Vero new clothes, then took them away when Vero couldn’t stop crying. Madame left Vero alone in this huge cold room for days and days. No sleeping on the bed. Vero found a closet instead. She curled up naked on the floor and cried for you.”

“Ronnie beat me the first night,” Marlene whispers, her eyes locked on mine. “Called me a stupid whore for losing you. Then he beat me the second night because I wouldn’t stop crying. Then the third and the fourth. The fifth night, the officer who’d come over to update me on your case ended up taking me to the emergency room. They had to screw my jaw back together. That officer, Hank, told me I should never go back to that apartment again. The first step to saving my daughter, he told me, was saving myself.”

“There were classes. Madame Sade came every afternoon. ‘Girls can’t afford to be stupid,’ she said. So Vero learned reading and math and geography and history. Then there was dancing and fashion and makeup and hairstyling. She told Vero she was her mother now. They were family. She would live in this beautiful house forever; she just had to do as she was told. Then Madame Sade would leave again and Vero was alone. Every morning, every evening. Hours and hours and hours, all night long, so very alone.

“Vero wanted to be brave,” I whisper. “But the isolation . . . It became harder and harder to remember who she was. And easier and easier to be whatever Madame wanted her to be. Especially once she turned twelve and the first man arrived. When it was over, she didn’t cry. Vero simply locked it all up, something that happened to someone else, and stuck it way back in her mind. None of that could’ve been done to the real Vero, because the real Vero was a princess from a secret realm, whose mother was a magical queen who’d vowed to keep her safe from the evil witch.”

I stare at Marlene. “Vero made up stories. Or maybe she did her best to remember her story. It is very hard to be yourself in the dollhouse.”

Marlene can’t look at me anymore. I’m not sure that I blame her.

“I returned to Ronnie,” she continues now, for this is as much her confession as mine, and thirty years later, there’s much to get out. “Second they released me, of course I came back. I didn’t know how to live alone. I’d been a young, stupid girl, already pregnant when we met. I couldn’t support myself, had never managed to hold down a job. Ronnie took care of me. And if he had a temper, sometimes drank too much, hit too hard, well, at least he put a roof over my head.

“But after you were gone, things got worse. Six trips to the emergency room later, the responding officer, Hank, said he’d had enough. I was coming home with him. He’d take the sofa. I got the bed. But in return, no more boozing, no more crying, no more dying. It was hard enough, one year later, to know he’d failed some little girl he’d never met. He’d be damned before he failed her mother, too.”

“Girls grow up. Even a beautiful princess . . .” I grimace, feel a spiderweb of memory brush across my mind. He doesn’t want you anymore; now what good are you? Madame Sade was angry. You didn’t want her anger. You couldn’t afford for her to be angry.

I shiver, struggling to shrug off the recollection. When I speak again, the image is gone, safely locked back up, and my voice is matter-of-fact. “Vero moved downstairs. She gained a roommate, a girl several years older than her, Chelsea. Chelsea also had dark hair, blue eyes, because that’s what Madame’s best customer preferred. Vero was happy to have a roommate, thinking that finally, she wouldn’t be alone. But Chelsea hated her on sight. No one had ever loved her the way Vero had been loved. Chelsea’s own mother had sold her to Madame Sade for a quick fix. At least at the dollhouse she had been the favorite, living in the pretty tower bedroom. Until, of course, Vero came along. Now Chelsea ripped Vero’s clothes, ruined her makeup.

“She made Vero sleep on a rug on the floor. She told Vero she was nothing more than Madame Sade’s pet. Except Madame Sade never kept her pets for long. Soon enough, she told Vero, they’d come for her. The only way out of the dollhouse was death, and Vero’s time was up.”

“The nights were always the worst,” Marlene says. “Watching the sun set, knowing another day was gone and I still didn’t know where my baby was. I wanted to drink. All the time. Instead, I dreamed of you. I’d sit on Hank’s sofa and I’d remember your first birthday, your second birthday, your third. Then, after a bit, I imagined your seventh birthday, your eighth, your ninth. But for your tenth birthday, I made a vanilla cake with blue frosting because you were older now, and I had to believe you were growing up. I had to believe you were okay.”

“Vero slept on the rug. She did her best not to make Chelsea angry. And every night, she whispered her stories to herself. Of the secret realm and the magical queen and the evil witch. Except one night, she discovered Chelsea listening. So Vero told another story, of a closet that was a portal between the worlds, and if she could just find the right door, she could escape again. Chelsea kept listening.” I close my eyes, and for a moment, I see it clearly. Two girls, both with dark hair, heads bent close as they huddled together. A happy memory, like freshly mowed grass. A moment when the dollhouse almost felt like home. I hear myself whisper: “Vero didn’t sleep on the rug anymore. She moved to the bed, right next to Chelsea, and they began to talk and trade secrets and exchange dreams. They became sisters. And Vero wasn’t alone anymore.”