The world fell away. She saw herself as a child, burning her hand on a samovar. She saw herself at seventy, alone in a room of ticking birds. She saw her father’s death—not from sickness, but from choosing to stop time around his heart so he could hold her mother’s ghost one last minute.
Alice could have shattered. Instead, she laughed. galitsin alice
Alice did not want the job. She lived in a narrow apartment above a shut bakery, tending to her father’s tools, winding the small wooden birds he’d carved. But the city was falling apart. So one frozen morning, she climbed the cathedral’s spiral stairs, carrying a brass key shaped like a question mark. The world fell away