Marta thought of memory as something private and fixed, but the city taught her otherwise. Memory here was porous—malleable as the salt marshes—changing with the tides. The house held a dozen more keys, each labeled in a hand she recognized: Pedro, Rosa, Manuel. These were not keys to rooms but to stories. When she used one, the house unfurled a scene: a laughter that rose from a 1950s kitchen where radio music made two women dance; a child’s sob muffled by the cushion of a market stall; a man’s quiet resolve as he signed papers to leave for Lisbon and never went. The house kept them like a garden keeps seeds—dormant until someone with patience and tenderness coaxed them back into green.