Over the years I have felt its weight grow in my hands. It feels so heavy now that I wonder how I managed to lift my hand with it on as a child. At least a dozen times I made plans to turn the ring over to a museum, anonymously, like a desperate woman leaving a newborn baby at a fire station. But I couldn’t bring myself to see it displayed in a house of plundered treasures. Statues and carvings and stonework float out of countries wrestling with genocide. Museums are more than willing to take them in, without asking the seller many questions.

Finders keepers, children shout on sunlit playgrounds.

Finders keepers, their parents whisper in halls of antiquities.

I know in my heart this ring belongs closer to where it was unearthed, closer to the remains of the woman who once wore it on her finger. But how can I entrust it to anyone?

Before the DNA tests concluded that the entire Romanov family had perished together on that night, dozens of women had claimed to be Anastasia or one of her sisters. If it weren’t for the lure of a bejeweled inheritance, I doubt that anyone would have willingly assumed the identity of the ill-fated Romanovs. Two young women claiming to be grand duchesses were taken into a nunnery in the Ural Mountains. They died years later, their graves marked with tombstones bearing the names of the Romanov sisters—their lies etched into stone.

The name on my tombstone will be a lie as well.

This bothers me, and I haven’t figured out how to fix it without turning my life inside out.

People wanted to believe Anastasia had survived somehow. She hadn’t. And I can say with perverse certainty that it wouldn’t have mattered if she had escaped alive. After her lungs had filled with gun smoke, after she’d seen the eyes of every member of her family go lifeless, there would have been little difference between living another five minutes and living five decades.

“Are you ready?” Mom asks, tapping on my bedroom door.

“Two minutes,” I say, replacing the ring before Mom sees it and wonders why I’ve taken it out tonight.

On the way to the theater, we talk about Adam’s campaign. Mom tells me she’s been following him on Facebook, which Adam uses for networking and Mom uses to connect with friends and colleagues around the world. I’ve stayed away from all of it because even when I searched for Shair or members of my family, I was always too scared of being found.