Prologue: The House
"A house is not four walls. It is everything that happened inside them."
The house smelled of old wood and freshly baked bread. It smelled of childhood and Sundays. Of the afternoon the youngest child was born, when the father ran upstairs with his heart beating faster than ever. Of the night the mother sewed for hours at the green dining room curtain while the rest of the family slept. Of birthdays, of winters, of arguments and of the embraces that came after.
It was called the Mole House because that was what Grandfather Tomas had named it when he built it with his own hands, stone by stone, beam by beam, forty-seven years ago. He said that moles were wise creatures: they lived close to the earth, they knew its secrets, and they never forgot the way back home.
Grandfather Tomas had been dead for twelve years, but his house still stood. And his son Andrei, now fifty-three years old with grey at his temples, was the keeper of a promise no one had asked him to make aloud, but which he had always accepted: to die here. To die like his father, surrounded by the same walls, beneath the same roof.
That was what Andrei had believed his whole life.
Until this October morning.
