Sometimes she wakes up at night and listens to Lara’s mumbling when she has a bad dream and Sveta’s even breathing on the bed across from hers. If she keeps her eyes open for a few minutes, the contours of things slowly step out of the darkness, like a developing photograph: the doors of the armoire materialize into a grainy image in the corner of the room, and the table covered with oilcloth gathers into a familiar outline next to what she knows is the doorframe. It is three or four in the morning because it is completely dark and silent: all the buses, trolleys, and streetcars are parked for the night in their depots, and the red neon sign for a Georgian restaurant they can’t afford has been switched off since midnight.

This is the time when guilt, a nocturnal predator, crawls out of its lair. She feels guilty for sauntering around Moscow as though she was born here, for singing on the oldest theater stage in the capital as though she were a professional actress. She feels guilty for living so close to Red Square and not wanting to admire the Kremlin wall or the Lenin Mausoleum. She feels guilty for not wanting to go back to Ivanovo.

She feels guilty about Marik. She sees him the way she last saw him, his eyes white with rage, his fingers clasped around the shell. This is the time she knows she could have stopped him. She could have averted his death, but instead, she ran away. This is the time of night when the tape of that day in the woods spins in her mind, the ruthless tape with no stop and no fast-forward button. Could she have asked Marik in a calm, mature voice to hand her the shell? “Give it to me right now,” she hears herself say four years too late, knowing that he would have done what she asked because he would have done anything for her. It seems so simple now, putting herself in control of a split second before everything changed, before everything slid off its base and collapsed.