“That’s what they told me at the orphanage. I guess they figured it’s easier for orphans to think their mother died than to know she just didn’t want to raise them.” Natalya turned the paper over. “There’s a name here. Her real name. And a last known address—from thirty years ago, but still.”
They looked at each other. The first snow was falling outside, soft and weightless.
“She might be alive,” Dasha whispered. “Our… grandmother.”
“She might be.” Natalya placed the letter on the table. Her hands were shaking. “Maybe she died a long time ago. Maybe she doesn’t want to be found. Maybe she doesn’t even remember giving birth to two girls.”
Silence. Dasha looked at the shelf where her mother’s photograph stood. The same smile. The same light in her eyes.
“Should we look for her?” she asked.
Natalya was silent for a long time. She looked at the letter, at her sister’s photograph, at her niece—the only family she had left.
“I don’t know,” she said at last. “Do you want to?”
Dasha looked at her mom again.
“She would have wanted to know the truth. The whole truth.”
A pause. The snow outside kept falling—quietly, stubbornly, blanketing the world in white. Natalya smiled. For the first time in the entire conversation.
“Then we’ll search. Together.”
Saturday morning was cold and snowy. Dasha pulled her knitted hat down to her eyebrows, wrapped her mother’s scarf around her neck; the scent of perfume had long since faded, leaving only the smell of wool and time, but she wore it anyway, and left the apartment. Only now, she wasn’t walking alone. Natalya was waiting for her at the building entrance in a warm coat, with a thermos of hot tea and a folder of documents under her arm.
“Ready?” she asked.
Dasha nodded. They walked down the snowy street: an aunt and a niece, two women bound by blood and loss, by pain and hope. Two women who were no longer invisible. A road lay ahead. Long, difficult, unknown. But now, they would walk it together.
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