“Pictures, right? That’s what you’re looking for. And you’re not finding any?”

The father spoke for the first time. The kind of trustworthy voice Grens wished he had. Pleasant but not submissive, dignified without needing to try. This was a man who probably never needed to raise his voice.

“Not even one photo of her. Alone or with us. Not even here in the room where we usually sit. We had pictures—tons of them. But she destroyed them.”

Grens looked around at what he’d already seen. Paintings, tapestries, figurines. But no pictures of the one they loved most.

“Hannah started asking us questions after just a couple of years. We don’t know why. Maybe someone said something. On the playground or at the school. Or maybe the memories she couldn’t reach started to reach her. ‘Who am I?’ It popped out at almost any time, and always in just those words. It broke my heart every time. ‘You’re our little girl. Our daughter.’ That’s how it felt. To us. ‘Who was I before? Whose daughter was I back then?’ When she got older, eight or nine, she started asking even more often, we told her what we knew. Nothing was left. That her past had disappeared, which was why she had to come live with us. That was around the time she stopped calling us Mom and Dad. Just Thomas and Anette. It never felt like she was trying to be cruel. It wasn’t a punishment. That’s just how she saw us.”

Grens had lost a baby before it was even born. He remembered how much it hurt, even though he’d never met his child. He could only imagine the pain of these parents, who nurtured and raised someone, and now spent their lives fearing the worst.