“Because of you,” I wanted to say, but I couldn’t say that. I nodded.

I wasn’t scared of the Russian government. Well, I was, but I thought of the warning woman and her massive bribe and what she would do if she’d approached us for Anya and then learned Anya was dead. We could get back to America and this could come crashing down on us.

We had been so happy just minutes before. It was so unfair. I steadied myself.

“What do we do?” I said.

“It looks like she’s been camping out here. When she’s found, it will look like a woman living alone out here who ran into a bad guy. That’s what it will look like.”

Kyle knelt next to me. He enclosed me in his arms. “We can do this. You can do this, Iris. For our children we can do anything.”

I decided then to believe him. Yes, I could be steel. The steeliest steel.

I stood with my son in my arms. I looked down at the body of the dead stranger. That’s what she had to be to me now. A dead stranger. A sad, broken woman I’d never really known, who for all intents and purposes took her own life.

We put the body in her car she’d parked next to the green house. Left the car door open. Wiped down any place we touched on the car. Turned the bloody snow over so the red didn’t show. I took the emerald and silver bracelet she’d let Grant play with and put it back on her wrist. Put our son in the baby seat and drove the car to Saint Petersburg.

I didn’t look back when we left the abandoned village. I never looked back, because there was nothing to see.

This never happened. This never happened. This never happened.

Appended to the journal page here, a handwritten note:

This never happened this way.—Danielle Roberts

57

Iris

Iris is up long before the dawn, thinking. The quiet—the awful quiet of half her family being in custody—has cleared her head. She has to think now.

And she’s been thinking about what her husband could have done.

Two things haven’t sat right with her. Someone beat up Kyle (she no longer believes he just fell down to the creek), and he had that computer in his trunk that she’d never seen before.

What do those things mean?

Kyle went somewhere, in the chaos of the bodies being found. On the greenbelt. Well, he could have gone to Danielle’s house that way if he didn’t want to be seen. And he had a phone she’d given him. Was he afraid of something else that could point at him? Or did he want to see if she had leverage against him or Iris?