Miriam’s breath caught. The name was unfamiliar, foreign in her family’s story. She whispered it aloud, and the sound seemed to thrum against the walls, unsettling the quiet. She could not remember ever hearing it spoken in their house, not once. Yet here it was, scrawled with the finality of something that had always been there, waiting.
Her fingers hovered above the twine, but she pulled back. Instead, she pressed her hand against the cool leather of the trunk. It felt solid, almost alive with the residue of years. She knew, with a certainty that made her shiver, that whatever answers her father had withheld, the reason for his distance, the silence that had shaped her childhood, were locked in here.