“Your mother was . . . many different things to different people,” he says. “But the things she is remembered for will never fully represent who she was. People have a habit of taking one moment, one facet of a life, and painting an entire portrait based on their own experience. We do it without exception, to everyone. To the world. To God. We assign stories to everyone around us out of our own need to feel that we understand someone or some thing. When the truth is that we don’t—we can’t—know anyone. Because we do not fully know ourselves.” He looks at me.

“We like to think we learn people. We really only learn their stories. So here is one for you: Amerie loved rain. The way it made people huddle together—under umbrellas, beneath awnings. The way it stopped traffic. She loved the smell of it better than sun, and could smell a storm hours before it came. She said she loved that it brought her to the now. Because the moment your plans for anything are ruined, you are forced into the present. And for that one, perfect, ruined moment, she did not worry about the future, and the past was washed away.”

Fat tears roll down my cheeks. He moves toward me, brushes them away with the back of a finger. And though it is the first human portrait I have ever had of my mother, I almost wish I had never heard it. It was far easier to be angry.

“If you want to know Amerie’s story, the short version—which is the only one that matters—it is that she loved you and protected you with her life.”

“But how did you know her? I mean, you’re a monk.”

“I wasn’t always a monk,” he says with a slight smile. “But now, you’ve come for something.”

“You conducted the mass in Lubenice.”

“That man is dead,” he says, opening the drawer, “having given his life along with two others in service to our cause. But he was not one of us. His killer could not steal his memory . . . or know that he gave this to me.”

He presses an envelope into my hand. “This is yours.”

It is far too light. And too small to explain even the first of my questions.

“You were expecting something else.”

“No. Yes. I don’t know what I was expecting.” There’s a ruckus from somewhere in the direction of the staircase. A man’s voice, and another I recognize as Claudia’s. The sound brings me back to the moment as surely as a clap of thunder. Three men have died for the thing in this envelope. Four, counting Ivan.

And possibly hundreds before them.

“The diary,” I say abruptly. “Does it exist?”

“If it does . . . that is the key to finding it.”