Sasha lowers the pages onto her lap and sits there. How long? She doesn’t know. Images roll before her eyes, things that happened after this letter had already been written and delivered. As she was memorizing her lines for her high school’s acting club, as the fire they’d made in the forest was licking at the snow and Andrei was handing the shell to Marik, as she was standing on the platform by the train bound for Moscow, this letter was already in this house, received and stashed away by her grandfather. Was it ever answered? Sasha can’t conceive of Grandma, who had been waiting for Kolya until the day she died, running to the gate every time it creaked, not answering this letter. She can’t imagine her not getting on a train to Moscow, with the letter in her purse; not taking a taxi straight to the Lubyanka KGB Headquarters and demanding—in a leaden voice Sasha heard only once—an immediate visa to see her son in the United States.

The bang of the front door plucks her out of her trance, and she knows it is Grandpa coming back, having finished his watering and weeding. She hears him stomp his feet on the doormat; she hears him wheeze and lumber toward where she is sitting, in front of the open door of the armoire, with his son’s letter, plucked out of darkness, in her lap.

For a few seconds he takes it all in, and she watches his jaw tighten and his nostrils flare as if he were taking a deep breath.

She rises from the stool and thrusts the letter into his face.

“Did you at least have the decency to write back?”

He doesn’t answer, but she sees his eyes darken, despite a sudden ray of sun that slants through the window from the courtyard.

“What are you doing in my room?” he roars.

“You know what I’m doing in your room,” she says in a voice she has never dared use in this house before. “You know what I’m doing, and you know what I’m holding in my hand.” She realizes this is the first time in her life that she has ever confronted him, a thought that surprisingly doesn’t make her knees wobble because she is no longer afraid of him. “Answer me!” she demands, knowing she is the only one left to whom he must now answer.

His face has stiffened, a ripple of hard wrinkles, like bark on an old oak. He turns his head away from her, clamps his hand into a fist. His fingers are old and gnarled, joints swollen with arthritis, and there is dirt under his fingernails. “My son was a traitor,” he says, spitting the last word out as if he were spitting out poison.