Chapter 1

She remembers the first time she saw it. She was seven years old, standing in her grandmother's bedroom, watching as the old woman pulled a cardboard box from the top shelf of the closet. The box was dusty and tied with a piece of string that looked like it might break at any moment. Her grandmother, whose name was also Davis, though she had married into it long before Andžela was born, untied the string with careful fingers and lifted the lid.

Inside was the scarf. It was deep burgundy, almost the color of dried blood, and it was thicker than anything Andžela had ever touched. Her grandmother lifted it out and held it up to the light, letting it unfurl like a flag. The wool caught the sunlight from the window, and for a moment, the whole room seemed to be filled with a warm, reddish glow.

"This was your mother's," her grandmother said. "She wore it when she was a girl. Now it is yours."

Andžela did not remember her mother. She had died when Andžela was only two years old, and the memories that remained were not her own but the ones her grandmother had woven for her—stories of a woman who laughed easily and sang while she cooked and wore a scarf the color of autumn leaves. Andžela reached out and touched the wool. It was soft, but it was heavy. Heavier than she had expected.

"Why did she leave it behind?" Andžela asked.

Her grandmother did not answer right away. She folded the scarf and placed it in Andžela's hands, then closed the lid of the box and returned it to the closet. Only then did she speak.

"She did not leave it. She wore it every day. When she got sick, I took it to the hospital, thinking she might want it for warmth. But she said to keep it for you. She said it would keep you warm when she could not."

Andžela had worn the scarf home that day, even though it was not cold. It was too long for her, the ends dragging on the ground as she walked, and her grandmother had to roll up the cuffs of her sleeves to keep them from getting dirty. But Andžela did not take it off. She wore it to dinner, and she wore it to bed, and she wore it to school the next morning, when the other children stared and whispered and pointed.

They called her names. They said she looked like a vampire in her grandmother's old cloak. They said she was strange. Andžela did not cry. She pulled the scarf tighter around her neck and walked faster, her eyes fixed on the ground, counting the cracks in the pavement until she reached the school doors.

It was Bruno who saved her. Bruno was a boy with wild black hair and a laugh that sounded like a broken engine. He was the only one who did not mock her. Instead, he walked up to her at recess, looked at the scarf with serious eyes, and said, "That is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen."

Andžela did not know what to say. She had never been told that anything about her was beautiful. She looked at Bruno, searching his face for a hint of mockery, but there was none. He reached out and touched the fringe, gently, as if he were touching something sacred.

"My mother has one like this," he said. "She wears it when she is sad. She says the weight of it reminds her that she is still here."

Andžela did not understand what that meant, but she nodded anyway. From that day on, Bruno was her friend. He was the only one. They walked to school together, shared their lunches, and spent afternoons in the park, where Bruno would tell her stories about vampires and ghosts and a woman named Margarita who lived in the sky. Andžela did not know where he got these stories. She did not ask. She only listened, and she wore her scarf, and she felt, for the first time in her life, that she belonged.

Years passed. Andžela grew taller, and the scarf grew shorter as her grandmother let out the hem. Bruno stayed the same height, but his voice deepened, and his stories became darker. He started talking about revolutions and prisons and a hotel where people went to disappear. Andžela did not understand all of it, but she listened anyway, because that was what you did for the people you loved.

When Andžela was sixteen, her grandmother died. The funeral was small. There was no one else. Andžela stood at the graveside in the cold November rain, the scarf wrapped around her neck, and she felt as though the weight of it might pull her into the ground. Bruno stood beside her, his hand on her shoulder, saying nothing. That was the first time Andžela understood that the scarf was not just warmth. It was a burden. It was the weight of her mother, and her grandmother, and all the women who had come before her, pressing down on her shoulders, demanding that she carry them.

She wanted to take it off. She wanted to throw it into the grave and walk away. But she did not. She kept it on, because it was all she had left.

Now, forty years later, Andžela sits on her bed and holds the scarf in her hands. She has worn it through every season of her life—through the years of loneliness, through the friendships that came and went, through the jobs that paid too little and the apartments that were too small. She has worn it through the night she spent in a hospital waiting room after Bruno's accident, and through the morning she woke up to find him gone, his side of the bed cold, his stories silenced forever.

She has worn it through everything. And she is tired.

The weight of the scarf feels different now. It is not the soft, comforting weight of her mother's memory. It is the weight of a chain. Andžela closes her eyes and tries to remember what it felt like to be seven years old, standing in her grandmother's bedroom, holding the scarf for the first time. She tries to remember the warmth. But all she can feel is the pressure on her neck, the wool scratchy against her skin, and she wonders if she has been wearing it for so long that she has forgotten how to take it off.

She opens her eyes and looks at the door. Outside, the world is waiting. There is a story she has never told, a thread she has never pulled, a knot she has never unraveled. She does not know if she is ready. But the scarf is heavy, and the night is long, and somewhere, in the distance, she hears Bruno's laugh, broken and beautiful, telling her to keep going.

Andžela stands up. She folds the scarf carefully, the way her grandmother taught her, and she places it on the bed. For a moment, she feels naked without it. The air is cold on her neck. But she does not reach for it. She walks to the door, opens it, and steps into the hallway.

The scarf remains behind her, a pile of burgundy wool on the bed, waiting. Andžela does not look back. She does not know if she will return for it. She only knows that she has to keep moving, one step at a time, into the unknown.

It is, she thinks, the most terrifying thing she has ever done.

And she does it anyway.