The Key

There once was a young woman who always felt as though she was a stranger in her own home. Even though her family was very kind, she felt like a visitor, as though she didn't belong. She often wondered what was wrong with her, and the sense of being in the wrong time or the wrong place somehow permeated everything, made everything unreal. Her father died, and then her mother; and she was given the charge of their home.

Amongst the papers and other things, there was a strange old key. It was very big and the young woman knew immediately what it belonged to - there was a big old box with iron wrappings in the attic she had seen when she was a child. She hurried with the key and climbed into the attic, unlocked the box, and inside it found proof that she was not the child of these parents, but that a king with a baby in his arms had come calling one stormy night, driven out by revolutionaries, and had begged them to take care of his only daughter.

They had taken the baby and he had been caught and killed the very next day. And with this knowledge, her life made sense, and from that moment forth, she had a life.