Chapter 1: The Scent of Wood
1.
The smell of blood still lingered in the wood.
Years passed. He changed the flooring, repainted the walls, rearranged the furniture a hundred times. But on the nights when he stayed up late—and most nights he did—the smell rose from beneath the floorboards like a memory that refused to leave. It was not a sharp smell, nor a clear one. It was more like the shadow of a scent. A prickling at the back of the throat. A faint metallic taste in the air when the stillness grew too heavy.
He had told the investigators more than once that he had forgotten that day. He said it in a calm voice, measured, free of any tremor. He had practiced the sentence in front of the mirror during those first days after the incident. "I don't remember anything." Then a more convincing version: "Everything is foggy." And finally he settled on: "I have forgotten it." He would pronounce it with his whole mouth, slowly, as if the word itself were a door closing. He repeated it in waiting rooms, in lawyers' offices, in the courthouse corridors that smelled of old paper and anxious sweat. He repeated it until sometimes he almost believed it.
But the wood never lied.
He did not need to believe. He needed the wood to be silent. But the wood never fell silent.
Cross sat on the edge of his metal bed, feeling the pain choose his left rib. The pain was selective, capricious, like a demanding guest. Sometimes it settled in his side, sometimes it moved to his lower back, sometimes it crept into his shoulder and stayed there like a small ember. He had come to know when the pain would come, how long it would stay, which corner of his body it would occupy. It was like learning a new language. The language of a collapsing body.
He learned how to breathe around the pain. How to open his chest in a way that let the air pass without brushing against the inflamed area. He learned how to walk despite the pain—measured steps, a back held rigid with a firmness that concealed the truth that every step was a negotiation with gravity. He learned how to hold his coffee cup in front of his colleagues with a hand that didn't tremble too much. The key was the grip. If you squeezed the cup tightly enough, the tremor hid itself in the tensed muscles.
Acting had become second nature. He no longer distinguished between his mask and his face. Sometimes, in rare moments before sleep, he wondered: was there even a face left beneath the mask?
But the paper in his hand today—he could not act in front of it.
Pancreatic adenocarcinoma. Stage three.
He read the words three times. The first time, they didn't reach his mind. They were just letters printed on cheap paper from a modest clinic. The second time, the words crept into his chest and settled there like a shard of ice. The third time—and the third time always breaks the thing—he felt something collapse in a deep place that had no name.
Jaundice had tinted the whites of his eyes a pale yellow for weeks. He had first noticed it in the work bathroom mirror. He stopped, leaned closer to the mirror, pulled down his lower eyelid with his finger. The yellow was faint, the color of weak tea. He told himself it was exhaustion. He told himself it was the lighting. He told himself many things, and all of them were lies he knew were lies.
He had lost enough weight that his clothes hung loose on him like empty sacks. His shirts that once fit his shoulders now slipped. His trousers needed a belt cinched tight with an extra hole he had carved himself with a nail in the night. When he looked in the mirror on the morning of the results, the reflection was the face of a stranger. Sunken cheeks, eyes ringed with dark circles like old bruises, skin stretched taut over bone in a way that reminded him of images he had only seen in anatomy textbooks.
The doctor said six months. Eight if the body was stubborn.
The doctor was a man in his fifties, wearing thick glasses that made his eyes look small and distant. His voice was gentle, practiced, the voice of a man who had said this sentence to hundreds of patients before. He was trying to be humane without being emotional. A difficult balance. Perhaps he practiced it too.
Cross did not ask about what came after eight months.
There was no need. He knew the shape of endings. He knew that some doors, once closed, do not open again. He knew that some questions need no answers because the silence is the answer.
He folded the paper slowly. Once, twice, three times. A small white square. He placed it on the small table beside his mother's photograph. That picture was the only thing he had never changed in the apartment. Everything else had been replaced—the wall color from pale green to neutral gray, the furniture from heavy old wood to cheap modern pieces, the curtains from flowered fabric to black cloth that blocked the light. But the picture frame remained. Wooden, simple, slightly worn at the edges.
The photograph was of a woman in her middle years. She was smiling at someone outside the frame. Perhaps at a person. Perhaps at the camera itself. Perhaps at the air. Cross did not know who had taken the picture. He had not asked her when she was alive. And now he could ask no one.
Had she truly been happy in that moment?
The question sometimes haunted him on sleepless nights. Could happiness be captured in a photograph? Could a smile be both real and false at once? He would stare at the picture for long minutes, searching for a clue in the corners of her mouth, in the wrinkles around her eyes, in the slight tilt of her head to the right. Sometimes he found the clue, then lost it the next day. Happiness is like water in a clenched fist. The tighter you squeeze, the faster it escapes.
He reached out to touch the wooden frame, then stopped.
His fingers were trembling.
Not just from the illness. From something else that no longer had a name. Something that had lived in his chest before the cancer, before the investigators, before the scent of the wood. Something old, primal, like a crack in the foundation of a house built before he was born. The tremor was different from the tremor of pain. It was deeper. It came from a place that painkillers could not reach.
He left the picture. Turned his back to it.
The picture looked at his back. It was smiling.
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