“If all this is true, then it’s Ned’s fault,” Grant says, unable to keep the bitterness down. “My mom told me he started this drug thing. He drew in my sister. His mother found out and maybe that’s why she and my dad fought, or whatever. It goes back to him. I wouldn’t loan him your friend’s plane again to make it easy for him to get out of the country as fast as his dad got here. But I know you’ll help him if he asks. You’re just too nice.”

He walks away, and when he looks back, once, Mike is still watching him.

Then he heads toward home. That journal. It has to be somewhere where no one would find it and Danielle could get to it to write him a note, like Mike said. The police have already gone through the house after his father’s arrest. So where might it be?

60

From Iris Pollitt’s “From Russia with Love” Adoption Journal

2002

I didn’t relax when we boarded the plane eight days later. We had flown first class over but flew economy back; I felt people would be more understanding about a baby in the back. Grant fussed and cried, and that kept me busy. People looked at me as if wondering why I would be flying transcontinental with such a young child. I ignored them. He would quiet down for Kyle more than me, so he became more Kyle’s problem. (This bothered me, and I wondered if it was because, at some deep level, he felt more protected with Kyle…considering what had happened.)

We were ten minutes late pulling away from the gate, me thinking the whole time that the police will come onto the plane and arrest us for murder. I was having second thoughts about our reaction. If we’d called the police immediately, well, the orphanage already knew Anya had tried to see her child at Volkov. Her kidnapping us would have sounded plausible. The Russians would have had to understand the shooting was an accident, a horrible tragedy, not a murder. Not a murder.

But we hadn’t played it that way.