It was utter stupidity to kiss on the riverbank where anyone in Ivanovo could have seen them, so Andrei now meets her on the edge of the park where it begins to turn into the forest. This is where they are: on the edge between the delineated pathways of the park and the wild, unchartered danger of the woods.

They meet in the evening, when Andrei comes back from work and before she has to go home for supper. For half an hour, they lie in the grass and talk and kiss and stare into the sky. Although it isn’t even six, the air becomes grainy with gathering dusk. Or maybe it only feels like twilight in their bed fringed by tall grass: sturdy stems of chamomile flowers and thick, oily leaves of yellow cups everyone calls “chicken blindness.” They are in their own space now, screened out from the sun, darkened and hushed. The space determines how much light reaches the roots of the plants around them and how willing the field is to accept their intrusion into its midst. Sasha looks to her left and sees the bluish band of the forest lit by the fading sun, as it stood watching the three of them, Marik, Andrei, and her, on that Sunday in March, collecting dead branches and then watching a fire consume them.

Andrei and Sasha never talk about that day in the woods, about the moment that changed everything. Does Andrei wake up and stare into the night, as she does, wishing he could make things go back to the way they were? Does he mourn the loss of his rival as much as she mourns the loss of her friend? But there is a darker question that Sasha would never ask anyone: Was Marik’s death necessary for the two of them to be lying in this field, the required conduit to their growing affection? What they don’t talk about is as dangerous as the forest itself, a secret they have kept out of sight, on the lowest shelf of their hearts.

Instead, they talk about Sasha’s school drama club and Andrei’s new job, safe topics unlikely to shake the earth on which they lie. She knows she has to tell him, sooner or later, that she is going to go to Moscow to study acting, and she has even tried to devise in her mind what she will say, but the words always seem to get stuck on their way out, as if caged by an invisible force inside her head.