The dining-room table was set with the best china, roses from the garden and even candles. Johnny MacIntyre had come—he was Major’s oldest and closest friend and long considered one of the family. Scotch-Irish to the bone, he was a tall, powerfully built man, save for his left arm, which was withered and lame. He’d been crippled in the same polio outbreak that struck Major. Their friendship had taken root in sickness, blossomed in recovery, and flourished in a shared determination to shatter expectations. Now in their late forties, they were a pair of twined oak trees, each man’s strengths compensating for the other’s weaknesses.

“Now tell us, my dear,” Major said. “How does en skandinav end up in Brazil?”

Kennet smiled, recalling his own skepticism. When Marta first took a blue thumbtack and pressed it into the map in her bedroom, just beneath the eastward bulge of South America, Kennet was sure Marta was pulling his leg. Brazil evoked images of tropical birds and palm trees, and that didn’t fit at all with his idealized narrative of Astrid as a winter princess, dressed in a fur-lined hood, riding in a sledge drawn by a white bear.

No boy likes his idealized narratives about girls altered.

“Were you born in Brazil?” Johnny MacIntyre asked. Growing up with Major had made him nearly fluent in Swedish.

“No, in Finland,” Astrid said. “But we fled for Sweden when I was still a baby.”

“Fled what?” Little asked. “The war?”

“You could say it was a little private war inside the great war. Finland had just gained independence from Russia, but the Finns couldn’t agree how to run the government. So they were at odds with each other, then Russia came to fight on one side and Germany on the other.”

“As if war and influenza weren’t enough,” Marta said. “Honest to goodness. Men and their wars. Put women in charge of the world and you won’t have all this nonsense.”

“Our queen hath spoken,” Emil said.

“So you ran away to Brazil?” Trudy asked Astrid.

“Sweden first. I lived there until I was six. Then we moved to Brazil.”

“It was nineteen twenty-four,” Marta said. “I remember the year exactly for two reasons. First, because my parents talked of nothing else. How my uncle had fallen in with some crazy movement with the idea to make a utopia on the other side of the world.”

“What’s a utopia?” Little asked.

“A perfect society,” Astrid says. “Like a paradise. Where everyone lives together and shares everything and all is equal peace and prosperity.”

“Communism without the state suppression,” Major said dryly.

Marta shrugged. “I don’t understand it any more than I understand Bolshevism or socialism or any other ‘isms.’ My aunt and uncle made up their minds and they packed up, booked passage and went.”

“Is that right?” Emil asked Astrid.