Chapter 1: The Archive

The morning Elena arrived at the archive, the rain had already soaked through her coat. She pushed open the heavy oak door and stepped into the hushed, paper-smelling silence that felt more like home than her actual apartment.

The manuscript had been misfiled for sixty years. That was the official explanation, anyway. Elena had stopped believing official explanations three weeks ago — approximately the same time she had discovered that every photograph of her grandmother had been removed from the archive's public record.