“I did what I’d wanted to do ever since my father returned from the camps. Ever since I remember.” He speaks hastily, words rolling down his tongue, as if all these years he has been waiting for this moment to tell her his story. “As he stood there swaying and bragging about how she finally got what she deserved, all I could think of were those times when I tried to protect her from him. So just as the burning house crashed behind us, as I saw blood soaking his shirt, I knew exactly what I was going to do. For the first time, I knew I could be free of him.” Andrei rubs his forehead, shielding his eyes with his palm. “I felt no guilt at that moment, no shame. But I must have felt shame because I drank for weeks. Every night when we returned from work, Vadim—my future father-in-law—set a bottle of vodka on the kitchen table. We drank from tea glasses, just the two of us.”

Sasha remembers this from their talk in Ivanovo, when Andrei told her his father’s camp stories. The two of them, he and his boss, hozyaeva, the masters of everything.

“I don’t remember how long I stayed with Vadim and his family. I don’t know how many times we left for work and came back together, how many bottles he set down on the table, how many times Natasha and her mother ladled soup into my bowl.

“What I do remember is that on one of those nights, I confessed to him what really happened. I told him I’d killed my father.” Andrei props his forehead with his hand and looks down. “And he told me that I was a hero. That I did what I had to do, what he would have done, what any man would have done. That was when he gave me a promotion. He said the Party needed strong, determined men like me.”

Andrei stops, presses his palms over his eyes, as if he wants to black out what he saw.

“With the promotion, they gave me an apartment, but I still went to dinner at Vadim’s at least once a week, an invitation extended by his wife, without fail. And every time, without fail, I felt Natasha’s liquid gaze on me, the heat emanating from her body when she stood close in the hallway to say goodbye. Why am I telling you all this? It doesn’t change anything. It can’t. Then one day she came to her father in tears and begged him to do anything to get me to marry her.” He pauses. “That was when Vadim gave me a choice”—the word echoes in Sasha’s head, in sync with her pulse—“a choice between a life of hard labor for murder and a life of privilege with his daughter.”