The house itself was modest, rooms smelling of lemon oil and book dust, with a small garden where a fig tree bent low. There were no answers waiting like coins on a table, but there were traces—photographs browned at the edges, a stack of pressed flowers, a journal whose pages had been filled in neat, patient ink. In those pages Sirina found fragments that felt like gifts: a line about learning to wait, a paragraph describing a storm that had set a lost boat trembling like a trapped animal, a small, precise notation about the taste of tomatoes in July.