A shadow dulled the brightness and morphed into the backlit outline of a man in a suit. The man tugged his pant legs and squatted to eye level and studied Jack’s face for a few long, silent seconds, then shifted to examine the neck wound and followed the trail of blood.

In accented English, he said, “You are shot?”

The question arrived more as surprise than concern, but that it had been asked at all was a message of its own. Jack tipped his head in the knife-wielder’s direction.

“Urvan stabbed me,” he said. The words scratched out like cotton dragged through brush.

The man motioned to the right.

Someone Jack couldn’t see put a bottle to his lips.

Water sloshed into his face, painted a patina over the desert in his mouth, and dribbled down his chin. Whoever held the bottle stepped aside.

Jack said, “My sister. Where is she?”

The man in the suit leaned in closer and looked at the neck wound again.

“She is near,” he said.

The reply was as much a nonanswer as the inquiry had been a non-question.

The suit tipped his chin toward someone off to the side.

The light cut off.

Jack’s eyes adjusted.

He faced a windowless wall, and the odd shadows on it spoke of table lamps on the floor and folding chairs and emptiness.

The man in the suit stood, flicked a finger toward the opposite wall.

Footsteps shuffled, the room emptied, and the door shut.

The man motioned to the restraints and then the chair.

“Is not meant to be like this,” he said. “Even so, we meet at last.”

The words implied Dmitry where Dmitry didn’t fit—where he didn’t want Dmitry to fit—and Jack scrutinized the face, searching for clarity.

The man said, “You are not recognizing me?”

Jack said, “I don’t know.”

In all twenty-six of his years, he’d only ever seen two photos of the man he assumed was his father, both of which had been taken before he was born, and neither of which had come from Clare. They’d arrived as bona fides together with the tickets to Berlin, sent by the voice who’d claimed to speak for Dmitry.

This man was anywhere between late fifties and late sixties, six feet, give or take, with a head of thick brown hair, a solid build, and the clear skin of a man who went heavy on clean eating and light on booze relative to a hard-drinking culture, but any resemblance he had to those photos was far off and faint, muddied by time and questionable provenance.

Jack didn’t believe this was Dmitry.

He also didn’t want to believe this was Dmitry.

And, like a therapist struggling to diagnose his own delusion, he was forced to give credence to a possibility he’d have otherwise rejected.

The suit pulled a key from his pocket and dangled it off a finger.