He looks first for Anna Averina. There are a number of them—Averina is not an unusual name. There are a few women with that name in the West: in Canada, in Australia. He clicks through. None of them appears to have lived in Russia for a while, or ever. Most of the other results are in Russian and he can’t read it. A few results are dead web pages, no longer active, and he wonders what that means.

Then he starts looking for Boris Stepurin. Here he gets an English-language result. Boris works for an investment firm that assists Western investors in finding opportunities in Russia, the Baltic states, and much of Eastern Europe. The photo shows a man in his forties, with blond hair starting to gray. The bio says he is married to an art history professor and that he has two sons, both a few years older than Grant.

He closes his eyes, thinking backward, about the few times he asked about his biological parents: What were they like?

Iris, or Kyle, depending on who he asked: You understand that we never met them. Your mother had you at this hospital—Mom would point at the paperwork—in Saint Petersburg and she never took you home with her. She came there alone, and she left alone. No one but Grant seemed to understand how sad that sentence was.

Once, he had asked: She didn’t hand me over to you? As if that somehow would have made it easier, as if his birth mother chose the Pollitts.

No, she didn’t. She gave you to the hospital and then the hospital gave you to the orphanage.

What about my father?

And every time he asked, he could see the smallest crinkle in his mother’s mouth. We don’t know anything but his name, sweetie. I don’t think they were a couple.

Maybe he would have wanted me when she didn’t.

He could see the pain in her eyes when he theorized about this alternate set of parents, but he couldn’t help himself. He was a kid grappling with this basic concept of his identity. Listen, I’m glad he decided to give you a better life, Mom would say. She would never in a million years say the phrase “they gave you up.” Grant knew she never wanted him to feel as though he’d been unwanted. It was always as if his parents were sending him to a better life. Never surrendering him, never thinking to themselves, Thank God we got rid of that baby neither of us wanted.