Nadav leapt into the room, slamming the door tight and bolting it shut behind him. He turned to face his family, all of whom were standing in a semicircle around him. “Back so soon? You’ve hardly been gone at all! You call that looking?” he heard Aunt Sarah say. He tried to start his excuses, but he couldn’t. He was gasping for air.

“Calm down,” his mother said, resting her arm on his shoulder, which already came up to her eye level. She pointed into the room. Isaac’s younger brothers stepped aside, revealing Isaac himself sitting wrapped in a blanket by the stove. “He took the main route back through town.” The family began smiling and laughing, loud laughs of relief that ruffled the air in the cozy room.

Only Sarah refused to laugh. Instead she repeated, shouting: “You call that looking? You gave up on him, you coward! Thank God he decided to take the short way home! He could have been killed! He could have been killed!” Nadav’s mother began to defend him, but Sarah refused to hear it, screaming again and again, “He could have been killed!”

Nadav tried to swallow his guilt and ignore her. But when he finally ventured to smile at his brother, he saw Isaac’s smile suddenly melt into a look he had never seen before on Isaac’s face. It was a look of pure disgust, as if Nadav were the most vile person he had ever laid eyes on in his life. When Nadav saw that face, he was suddenly blinded by the barbarity of what he had done in that moment of spinning away from the corpse in the snow. He had decided that his own blood was redder.

But all that—the peasant’s neck, the blood on the snow, the numb revulsion on Isaac’s face—all that was nothing, a snowflake on the tundra, a single lost teardrop in the giant salty ocean, compared with what happened between him and Isaac five years later. And then, as he climbed up on the white-painted desk chair in the children’s bedroom and slid the noose around his neck, Nadav allowed himself to remember.