The question nobody thought to ask

My grandmother was 14 when the Soviets came. She remembers the sound the trucks made on the street. She remembers who disappeared first, and who pretended not to notice.

I found this out by accident — she mentioned it in passing while we were making lunch. A sentence, then silence, then back to the soup.

That's how most stories die. Not in dramatic finality, but in the ordinary gaps between one sentence and the next. Nobody pressed record. Nobody said: tell me everything, I'm not going anywhere.

The stories that get preserved are the ones somebody was stubborn enough to ask for. Alice exists to be that somebody.