“It says our names,” he said. “Both of us. It’s legal.”
Three days later, they were standing on a narrow unpaved road at the edge of a village so small it had no signpost of its own, looking up at the wooded slope where the road continued to climb before disappearing into a wall of pine trees. The bus from Brno had taken four hours and deposited them at the village square, which was not so much a square as a widening in the main road, anchored by a post office and a small shop with a handwritten hours sign taped inside the window. The driver had told them to walk from there. Another two kilometers, he said, up the road that follows the treeline.
The air was cold and clean and smelled of wet earth and pine resin and something further back beneath both of those things that Marta identified before Alex did because she had a better memory for that particular register of sensation.
“I remember this,” she said, gripping his hand as they started up the slope. Her voice had shifted into the quieter register she used when she was feeling something she had not yet found words for. “She used to stand at the top of this road when we came to visit. Standing there with her arms crossed, just watching us come up. Like she’d been watching the whole time we were on the bus and this was just the final part.”
Alex remembered too, though his memory of it was through a different lens, the lens of a twelve-year-old who had been more focused on his grandmother’s cooking than on the geometry of arrival. He remembered the kitchen more than the approach. The low ceiling and the woodstove and the table that was slightly uneven on one leg and the blue-painted chairs that Helena had repainted herself every few years because she believed, with the pragmatic certainty of someone who had lived through several eras, that maintenance was a form of respect.
The house emerged from the fog gradually, the way significant things sometimes do, giving you just enough time to prepare yourself and never quite enough. It sat at the end of a short path that branched off the main track, surrounded by overgrown grass and the bare framework of what had once been a kitchen garden along the southern wall. The wooden boards of the exterior had darkened with moisture and time, and several roof tiles were visibly missing or displaced over the rear section. The porch sagged at one corner where a support post had settled into the soft ground. The windows were dark and filmed with the particular opacity of glass that has not been cleaned from the inside for a long time.
It looked small. It looked old. It looked like a house that had been managing on its own for too long without someone to look after it.
It was, without question, the most valuable thing anyone had ever given them.
Mr. Carter was waiting at the gate, a man in his late fifties in a good wool overcoat that was slightly too formal for the setting, holding a manila folder with both hands in the manner of someone who has arrived early and is maintaining composure through propriety. He was a tall man who stood with the slight forward lean of someone accustomed to looking down at paperwork, and he studied Alex and Marta as they came up the path with an expression that was carefully professional and only very slightly surprised, the surprise of someone who had been told the heirs were young and had still not quite calibrated his expectations to the reality of two thin teenagers in worn coats carrying backpacks that held everything they owned.
He cleared his throat.
