My aunt lives alone here. There are traces of a former husband in old pictures in the bookshelf and on a wooden table in the hall, but I haven’t figured out yet if she’s widowed or divorced. We need to get to know each other better before I ask her that. She’ll tell when she’s done asking all of her questions, so many of which I cannot answer.

It’s a beautiful house. Way too big for just one person. The silence of the water and the lack of any neighbors feels peaceful, the noise that’s always inside my head seems to almost stop here, but it soon starts again with a different kind of spinning. And when my aunt pulls a photo album out of a huge escritoire, this new noise gets even worse, spreads into every part of me. Suddenly I realize it’s impossible to delete yourself. All the pictures I burned at Thomas and Anette’s, and all along sitting in a box in a tiny city in northern Albania there were just as many.

Who is that girl with Zana written beneath her picture?

What is she thinking?

I can see that she’s me, we have similar features, but I don’t feel close to her, she’s a stranger. It was too long ago to connect it with the present.

My favorite is a photo that takes up a whole page of the album. Mom and Dad. Before Eliot and Julia and I even existed. They’re so young, like I am now. They hold each other, love each other, trust each other. They could do anything, be anything. They have no idea that in just a few years they’ll be dead in an apartment in Stockholm, along with their two oldest children. I wish I could talk to them, warn them. Because there, in that photograph, they’re still alive.

“You can’t stay here, Zana, do you understand?”

“Here? With you?”

“In Albania. In Shkodër.”

“I just got here!”

“And now you have to leave again.”

“Not stay . . . I’m home. That’s how it feels. Aunt Vesa? I’m home for the very first time.”

“You’ve been going around asking a lot of questions. It’s dangerous. Very dangerous.”

“What’s so dangerous?”

“The wrong people found out. And they don’t take risks.”

“Risks? Why? I don’t understand.”

“Because your father was very successful.”