Chapter One

Need to Be Needed

Stoyan, forty-one years old, sat at the table in the kitchen with his fourteen-year-old daughter. The window behind him was open, and the linden tree outside let its sweetness into the room the way it did every June, whether anyone noticed or not. They had both come home for the lunch break. His mother sat quietly in the corner, knitting a new sweater for her granddaughter, Ana. Her favorite people were here with her. She had made their favorite dish, stuffed red peppers.

The room was so quiet that you could hear pieces of conversation drifting in from the front yard — a neighbor calling to a child, the scrape of a gate. Stoyan sat with an empty look on his face. He was eating, but he was not at the table. Ana, in her own world, was bent over a notebook, drawing something only she could see, too quietly eating beside him. Her grandmother asked them, twice, what they wanted for dinner, before either of them registered that she had spoken at all. In the next room, Grandfather napped. Ana’s mother and sister were at a doctor’s appointment; they would come home later only to find that they had missed Ana and Stoyan entirely.

It was 5:15 when the front door opened. Stoyan was home.

Katya greeted him with questions and excitement — she had news. They had been on the waiting list for an apartment in the newest development for four years, and today, finally, they had been offered one. Ninety square meters. First floor.

Stoyan asked her to give him a few minutes to change his clothes. He went into the other room and sat on the edge of the bed.

He did not reach for a clean shirt. Through the wall he could hear Katya moving around the kitchen, the particular clatter she made when she was excited and trying not to show it too much — a cabinet door, a pot set down harder than it needed to be. Ninety square meters. First floor. Four years on a list and now, of course, now, when he’d half hoped the complex would stall another winter, the way these things usually did.