The safe
I don’t know how I got into the basement. The feet themselves took me – as if Catherine’s memory, of Julian, of this house were pulling me.
I knew where the safe would be before I saw it.
A fake brick in the wall to the right of the old boiler.
My fingers dialed the code without thinking.
Four digits.
Catherine’s birthday.
Inside – folders with half-burnt protocols, photos from the lab, copies of a police investigation, bank statements from accounts that my father had never talked about.
I read and two lives intertwined before my eyes:
of a girl running barefoot on a panel balcony in Pazardzhik, and of a woman who signs documents for dangerous experiments in sterile white corridors.
Both mine.
