After that there’s a long black line. That’s what it looks like to me.

Until I’m standing on the steps at Thomas and Anette’s.

Chapter 32

Ipull down the window as we slowly roll into Shkodër’s train station, then, like so many of my fellow travelers, I lean out, hanging there free to wave or call out someone’s name or maybe just feel the wind and cool off a little. The wheels squeal against the rails, and the brakes don’t seem to be what they should, we rock back and forth and slowly rumble to a stop. The platform is soon packed and hot and people jostle and crash into each other, but I barely notice any of it. I’m so happy to be here.

I walk along a river called Drin, then another river called Buna, and the two together form a dirty blue string that wraps the inner city tight and then lets it spread out again. I wander along stone streets, which are so lively and chatty, and I stop at a café with two tables and four chairs, where I’m served black tea in a tiny, filthy cup and a double-decker sandwich on a red plastic plate by a very fat, very smiley man who sings out loud behind the counter, something that sounds like opera but slides from key to key. I’m in no rush, I know where I’m going. When I get to the square, which has two restaurants and a wedged-in grocery store at Rruga Kolë Idromeno, I turn right onto Rruga Kardinal Mikel Koliqi and then almost immediately left onto Rruga Hysej. A street so narrow if a driver turns the wheel too hard or too fast the paint gets scraped off their car. And there, in a building behind a yellow-brown gate covered by the branches of a Mediterranean tree that I don’t know the name of, I’ve rented a room on the second floor with access to a bathroom and a tiny kitchen with an electric kettle and a tabletop dishwasher for four plates and glasses.

Tomorrow I’ll start looking.

For myself.

Chapter 33

A whole week.

And—nothing.

I’ve been cautious, disguising my questions inside other questions, wrapping them in excuses and reasons that obscure what I’m really looking for. Lilaj. Letters that finally came to me from someplace deep inside just a few years ago, not long after I found the letters that formed Shkodër. Suddenly it seemed so obvious! They’d been spinning around in there for such a long time, back and forth, I’d seen them, but couldn’t understand. L-I-L-A-J. Until one morning on my way to school, there it was—my name and Mom’s and Dad’s and Eliot’s and Julia’s.