Mrs. Valcheva smiled through tears.
Persistent. Too stubborn. He always protected the people that someone thought were weaker. He once came home with his lip broken because he had intervened when several older boys were harassing a child from the neighborhood.
That sounded like him.
“She liked to paint,” she continued. “There were notebooks full of sketches of houses.” He said he was going to be an architect. Then his life went in a different direction.
I never knew that.
Stefan had never told me about his childhood. He said he had nothing to say. That the past is not important.
Now I understood why.
Not because it wasn't important.
Because it was too painful.
"Why did you change your last name?" I asked.
She looked down.
"After he ran away, he found Nikola Nikolov. He was an old friend of our mother's. He didn't have children of his own. He helped him finish school, gave him a job. Then he officially adopted him when Stefan turned eighteen.
"And you didn't look for him?"
"I was looking for him. I wrote to him. I called old friends. But our father found some of the letters and..." she paused. "I wasn't as brave as I should have."
I didn't tell her that was not enough of an excuse.
She knew it.
In the coming days, our lives have changed.
First the police called us for a statement.
Then the headmistress, or Svetla, as she asked me to call her outside of school, invited us into her home.
