“My wife is a good woman,” he says, fumbling inside his pockets, as if he were looking for something and not finding it. “I only wish she’d found someone better than me, someone more deserving. I don’t love her, and I never did.” He plays with a pack of matches he has fished out of his pocket. “She fell in love with me the first time we met, the daughter of my boss, someone to whom I owed everything. He took a big chance on me when I had nothing, not even a pair of shoes to wear to the office. Anyway, she begged him to do whatever he could to get me to marry her, even if it meant twisting my arm. She sensed that I was in love with someone else, but that didn’t stop her. She just refused to feel humiliated. She wanted me, and nothing else mattered.” Andrei lights a cigarette he finally finds in his pocket, inhales, and lets the smoke extinguish a whirl of snowflakes. “A pathetic story, isn’t it?”

He pauses, and from the corner of her eye, Sasha sees him bite his lower lip, as if getting ready to tell her something. For a few seconds, he seems on the verge of letting the words out, but then he looks away. She sees his hand with the cigarette tremble, or maybe he is simply shaking off the ashes. “My father-in-law has been diagnosed with cancer,” he finally says. “He needs surgery and then radiation. My wife is devastated. If she didn’t have me, she would fall apart.”

Sasha tries to imagine a woman who had to beg her father to make someone marry her against the man’s will. Or was it really against the man’s will, after all, if the man agreed to the marriage?

“But you allowed your arm to be twisted. You did what they wanted you to do.”

“It wasn’t that simple.” She hears him shift on the bench, as if with his weight he could substantiate this claim. “There were things done that couldn’t be undone. There were things said and choices made. It’s always about choices, dead ends and mistakes.” She hears him inhale as if he were preparing to say more. “Do you want to hear a little story about my father-in-law’s choices? The story he told me a couple of weeks ago when I visited him at his dacha. Maybe it was his cancer diagnosis that helped loosen his tongue about his past, but once he set the vodka down and started talking, my only job was to sit back and listen.”

She is too tense to sit back, but she is willing to listen.