I am unsure what motives a person would have to fabricate such an attack, but I hope that you will retract this claim. Zoo Berlin has always made the safety of our animal residents and our human visitors a top concern. There are people who believe zoos are inherently unsafe and unfounded claims such as yours give them fuel for their fire.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Sincerely,

Ute Neumann

I had never bothered to contact the letter writer, but her message had turned my life upside down. I remembered the day of the attack—at least, I recalled walking through the zoo with my mother, hand in hand. Some pieces were fuzzy—my mother had purchased a stuffed tiger, the most macabre souvenir in the world, for me—but others were clear as day. The sharpest moment was falling into the enclosure. Somehow, I had clambered to the top of it and dangled over the edge for what seemed like forever, to my mind. Finally I fell, and the tiger pounced on me in an instant, ripping into my flesh.

That tiger stalked me in my sleep.

The letter was a shock, but I set it aside at first, thinking my family had simply made a mistake in the telling of the story. Perhaps it had been a different zoo, and I’d confused it because my tiger’s collar was marked “Zoo Berlin.” When I started poking at the story, I’d found no zoo with an incident that matched my memory. What I’d discovered were various tales of tigers owned by wealthy families attacking a guest. None of them fit my recollection, and that made me realize what my family had told me was a lie.

It wasn’t the reason I left Thraxton International, but when the time came to choose the path I wanted to follow, that made it easier. My mistake was in thinking that Caroline would want to leave with me.

My flight arrived in the middle of the morning. I checked myself into the first hotel that came up in the app I checked. It was called the AC Hotel Humboldthain, named for the rustic park immediately to its south. It was technically in Mitte—the central district of Berlin—yet in Gesundbrunnen, an area that was traditionally working class and not terribly touristy. The remains of the infamous wall and Checkpoint Charlie were a world away. It wasn’t an area I knew, but it had a transit hub that could get me almost anywhere in Berlin.