Valera had brought a lie with her when she’d come to Povenets B, and she’d trapped herself in it. Ledjo had been the result of a brief affair with a young Red Army officer. The relationship had been intense, but when Valera told her lover she was pregnant and wanted to get married, he told her to get rid of the baby and then left himself. Valera didn’t want an abortion, but she also didn’t want a child who would have to grow up with the stigma of being a bastard. So, she invented another end to the story of the Red Army officer, which involved him dying tragically in service of Soviet glory.

She’d forgotten that the role of the mourning, withdrawn widow was one she was supposed to play for the rest of her life, until the stranger at the school gates had reminded her. They’d also made her realise that she wasn’t Zukolev’s favourite at all. She was his prey. She was the only single woman and only single parent in Povenets B, and she’d let herself be manoeuvred into a position that made both her and Ledjo extremely vulnerable.

Finally seeing the real agenda beneath Zukolev’s kindness, Valera refused his next invitation to dinner, and sent away the man who appeared at her door with two plucked chickens the following night.

Zukolev’s behaviour changed instantly. He became as cold as the winter wind that rattled through Valera’s bungalow and chattered Ledjo’s milk teeth. For the next eighteen months he delighted in making her life difficult, reminding her at every opportunity that he had the power to make it—and Ledjo’s—even worse whenever he wanted. He would sporadically summon her to his office to tell her that her research was too slow, too expensive, or just outright useless. It didn’t matter that he had no comprehension of the particular area of radio wave physics to which Valera had dedicated every last bit of her energy and life that wasn’t already given to Ledjo.

Over the last year their run-ins had become more frequent, and they now averaged one a week. Moscow had started to put pressure on Zukolev, so he was heaping it on her. Even locked away in the depths of Karelia, news from the outside world filtered through. Valera knew that America’s desire to win the space race was as strong as Russia’s. And she guessed scientists somewhere in the West were working on the same problems she’d been tasked with solving to help their side achieve a final, insurmountable victory.

‘What shall we have for supper, Pikku?’ Valera asked Ledjo as she untangled herself from his arms.

‘Caviar!’ Ledjo cried. ‘Goose!’

‘Of course, Pikku. Anything for you.’

Valera left Ledjo to lose himself his imagination, and scoured the dark kitchen cupboards for any potatoes or grains that might have magically appeared in them.