The courtyard is filled with the bitter smell of wet ash, and Andrei is slouched on the ground next to the fence, streaks of black across his face. Sasha kneels down next to him.

“Tell me what happened.”

He doesn’t move and doesn’t say anything, as if he didn’t hear her. And maybe he didn’t.

For about a week after the fire, Sasha cannot find Andrei. He is not in any of their usual haunts; he has completely disappeared. Asking her mother would only provoke another tirade on danger. Two years ago, Sasha would have asked Marik, but all that is left of her friend is a heavy stone of guilt in the pit of her stomach. And now there is more guilt staring her in the face: the approaching date for her Moscow drama school exam, the knowledge that she must leave her life in Ivanovo, the nauseating feeling that she must leave Andrei, in spite of what he has lost.

What would Andrei do if her house burned down, her mother, Grandma and Grandpa, and every one of Kolya’s paintings she knows by heart, gone? If she were alone and the only thing she had left was a charred carcass of what used to be her home spreading the reek of damp ash all over the courtyard? Would Andrei leave her for Moscow?

She stands at the streetcar stop when Andrei appears in the opening door, ready to get off. He freezes when he sees her. A wiry woman pushes him in the back with a string bag full of turnips, but he doesn’t move. He doesn’t seem to notice the impatient passenger behind him. All he sees is Sasha, her face naked in its trust, open to him and no one else.

He steps forward and embraces her. For a moment, Sasha doesn’t know what to do with her arms, but then they rise and wrap themselves around him. The two of them stand like this, buried in each other, for how long she doesn’t know. Inside her, the love for Andrei pulsates with such intensity that it nearly burns, catapulting her back to the memory of a ball of lightning she saw when she was six.