13
The Name
Monika
Idreamed of the farm.
Not the way it was at the end—empty and sad, the animals gone, the silence pressing against the walls like something alive. I dreamed of the farm the way it was when I was small, when my mother still sang in the kitchen and my father still laughed and the barn smelled like hay and summer and the particular sweetness of things that haven't learned to die yet.
In the dream, I was walking through the pasture, barefoot, the grass wet with dew. Mercy was following me—Mercy, the calf I'd delivered when I was ten, grown now into a cow with a white blaze and dark, patient eyes. The sun was warm on my shoulders. The sky was impossibly blue.
And then the sky turned grey. The grass turned to gravel. The barn became a warehouse, and the warehouse became a cage, and I woke up with my heart pounding and my sheets tangled around my legs.
The bedroom was dark. The fire had died hours ago, leaving only the faint glow of embers and the cold light of the moon through the windows. I lay still for a long moment, listening to the house settle around me—the creak of old wood, the whisper of the heating system, the distant sound of something that might have been footsteps or might have been nothing at all.
I couldn't sleep. I'd known I wouldn't sleep. The bed was too soft, the room too quiet, the name too new on my tongue.
Monika Mire.
I threw off the covers and padded barefoot into the hallway.
The mansion at night was different.
The portraits on the walls seemed to watch me as I passed, their painted eyes following my movements. The chandelier in the foyer was dark, the crystals catching the moonlight in small, cold glints. I walked without thinking, my feet finding their own path, carrying me through corridors and past doorways until I found myself in front of a door I recognized.
Aleksander's study.
There was light beneath the door—a thin line of gold against the darkness. I could hear movement inside, the soft clink of glass on wood, the creak of a chair. I raised my hand to knock, hesitated, then pushed the door open without waiting for an answer.
He was sitting behind his desk, a glass of whiskey in his hand, his eyes fixed on something I couldn't see. The fire had burned low, casting his face in shadows and light, carvingthe lines around his mouth into something deeper than I remembered.
He looked old. Tired. Human in a way he never allowed himself to be during the day.
"Can't sleep either?" I asked.
He looked up. His grey eyes found mine, and something in his face shifted—softened, opened, became something I hadn't seen before.
"No," he said. "I can't."
He didn't ask why I was here. He didn't tell me to go back to bed. He just gestured to the chair across from his desk, and I sat, pulling my robe tighter around myself. The silk was cold against my skin, and I wished I'd worn something warmer, something that didn't make me feel so exposed.
We sat in silence for a long time. The fire crackled. The clock on the mantel ticked. Somewhere in the house, a branch scraped against a window, and I shivered.
"You're cold," Aleksander said.
"I'm fine."
"You're lying."
He stood and walked to the fireplace, adding another log from the stack beside the hearth. The flames caught, flared, and the room grew warmer. He stood with his back to me for a moment, his hands on the mantel, his head bowed.
"I used to sit in here for hours after she died," he said. "My wife. I'd drink and stare at the fire and try to remember the sound of her voice. But I couldn't. I'd been with her for twenty years, and I couldn't remember what she sounded like."
"What did she sound like?"
"I don't know anymore." He turned to face me. "That's the worst part. Not the grief. Not the guilt. The forgetting. The way the people you love become ghosts in your own mind."
I thought about my mother. About the sound of her laugh, the way she'd hummed while she cooked, the soft lullabies she'd sung when I was small. I could still hear them. Barely. Like an echo from a very long distance.
