The top photograph was black and white, faded, and creased with time. A young woman smiled shyly at the camera, holding the arm of a man in a soldier’s uniform. The man looked familiar. Not personally — Yulia had never seen him before — but there was something in his eyes. Determination, perhaps. Or quiet defiance. She couldn’t explain it. But she felt it.
She looked around again, half-expecting someone to come sprinting toward her, claiming the bag. No one came.
Yulia sat on the cold stone edge of the nearest grave, her hunger momentarily forgotten. She opened the notebook. The first pages were filled with spidery handwriting, a mix of diary entries and letters. The name at the top: “To my son, when the time is right.”
The dates spanned decades. Some entries were written from hospitals. Others from faraway places — Chechnya, Luhansk, Crimea. The writer had been a soldier, and a father, recording every detail of a life spent in service, loss, and love.