🕊️ The Bird in the Cracks

Age: 18+130 pagesA modern thriller and drama for adults in chapters — idea & editing by Dheiab Alawfi, written with AI assistance

Lisbon, 2024. Sara Haddad, a painting conservator, finds a tiny bird hidden in the cracks of a Dutch masterpiece worth forty-two million euros: her painter father's secret mark. The museum's painting is a forgery, and her father painted it thirty-three years ago to pay for her mother's heart. That same day her father is kidnapped, and the kidnapper demands the original before midnight on her sister's wedding night on the Douro. Three days of chases across the rooftops of Alfama, the forest of Sintra, a night train and the bridges of Porto, with a mysterious investigator with a scarred eyebrow, and a sister who holds the lamp in her wedding dress. (For adults: kidnapping, weapons and violence)

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How it begins: 06:40 — The Lab

Lisbon doesn't wake up. Lisbon stretches. It opens one eye over the Tagus and leaves the other asleep in the narrow alleys, where yesterday's laundry still hangs between balconies, and where cats sit on blue-tiled doorsteps as if guarding something nobody knows about. Sara Haddad has been awake since five. She is standing on the third floor of the Casa Almeida museum, in the restoration room she calls "the white room," because everything in it is white: the walls, the tables, the lamps, her coat, the cotton on the tips of the thin wooden sticks in the glass in front of her. Only the painting isn't white. The painting is blue. "Girl with the Blue Letter." Jan van Oosterhout. 1661. Oil on canvas. Sixty centimetres by fifty. A Dutch girl of eighteen standing by a window, the light coming from the left as it always does in the paintings of that century, an open letter in her hand, and the…

The lesson: The faces we love do not live in paint but in us, and whoever runs toward the ones they love without thinking is richer than whoever owns every painting

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