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László
Thecardidn’tpullaway until I’d closed the door behind me.
Even then, I heard it reposition, grinding against the icy curb just twenty meters down. A second car idled up the street, pointed in the opposite direction. Both cars held dark windows and darker intentions.
My Soviet minders’ presence was no longer subtle. They were no longer hiding.
I stood at the entryway of my home—no,ourhome—peeling off my gloves with slow fingers, letting the silence settle in around me. Eszter’s coat still hung on its peg by the stairs. Her scarf was looped in a lazy knot, the one I’d tied for her so many times before school. The soft multicolored fabric looked faded in the winter light.
It had been seven days since I last saw her.
Seven days since the Soviets took her.
Seven days of pretending to work on the machine, pretending I wasn’t unraveling, pretending I wasn’t counting every tick of every second until I could try, hopelessly, to bargain for her release.
I kicked off my shoes and turned toward the kitchen to begin the ritual of another empty evening. That’s when I noticed something odd.
Milk.
There were two glass bottles, capped in red wax, sweating in the cold beside my stoop.
“That is odd,” I said to no one. “Milk wasn’t due for another two days.”
I crouched and carefully retrieved the bottles. The tops had frozen, a rim of white snowflakes forming under the wax caps. I turned one in my hand, examining it through the frost-speckled glass.
Nothing unusual jumped out, but the off-schedule delivery sat poorly with me. It wasn’t alarming, not yet. It was just . . . off.
Still, I brought them in. It wouldn’t do to leave them out there. The last thing I needed was for a neighbor to ask questions.
I set the bottles on the kitchen counter and moved to change clothes. My shoulders ached from the long day of feigned calculations and tightened tension. The guards at the facility had hovered from their sentry posts near the door. One of them—the taller one, the one with eyes like sharpened iron—had asked, too casually, what I was “really building.”
I told him the truth, though I doubted he believed me.
Desperate for warmth, I changed into an old cardigan and house trousers. The sleeves of the sweater were too long, as always. Eszter had loved to pull them over her hands and laugh about how “Papa looked like a scarecrow.”
I left my bedroom door ajar as I padded back into the kitchen, the wood floors cold underfoot. I opened a cupboard, stared at the rows of dry lentils and dusty tins, and let my eyes rest on the box of pasta Eszter had once tried to cook all by herself. She’d nearly burned the house down. I hadn’t had the heart to throw the box away.
Despite my searching, there was no hunger in me, but I needed to eat, for her, if nothing else.
I filled a pot of water from the tap and lit the stove.
Then I glanced again at the milk bottles.
Something about them itched against my mind. Was it the delivery? The frost? The way the light caught inside the glass?
I opened the icebox and set one bottle inside.
The other I left out.
Curiosity bested caution.
Slowly, I removed the wax cap and poured myself a glass. The milk hit the bottom with a soft glug, swirling in the cold tumbler. Lifting the milk, I tilted the bottle again, watching the liquid descend.
And then—
Faint but legible.