No matter that the Meshchersky family—father and mother and nieces and brother and governess—were now in Elko, Nevada, attending to their jobs at a Basque restaurant, and the father would soon be fired for pilfering just a bottle cap of potato vodka and need to find work at the gasoline station, where he would wear coveralls and smell of aviation fuel and stare down the desert highway, a long, straight, perfect line of dust, working his jaws as senselessly as a cow chewing cud. Really: that was of no matter. For, even so, Hugo, lit by the sepia shine of the torchères, was close to getting what he had always wanted.

No matter. Hugo put Vasilisa’s hand atop his. Hers was cold to the touch, tiny, softer than any other girl’s. It was folded over loosely, not quite a fist. There was a single freckle on one knuckle, and she wore two rings, silver, on her index finger, and the nail of her thumb had gone ragged from biting.

She uncupped her hand. “For you,” she said. It was her dowry. The only thing she had left on earth, and in fact something she had received herself only a few minutes ago.

It was a single, foil-wrapped square of Cadbury chocolate.

The dancing had caused Hugo to perspire. He could see again, outside the immediacy of the light, how the walls were painted with tree trunks and the timbers of the roof with leaves. He felt as if he stood on a bridge between his real life and one promised. Something was coming to an end. “Vasilisa,” he said quietly. “Is this yours?”

She shook her head. She pointed to him. It was his now.

“I—I don’t—it’s lovely, but where did it come from?”

From a distance, Aarne cleared his throat. “In a sense, it was yours already, Private Hugo.”

Hugo looked at him blankly.

“Spoils of war. I gave it to the child after liberating it from the Bolo outside.” Aarne patted Hugo on the sleeve. “She likes you, and so she gives it to you freely.”

It weighed nothing. Hugo could smell flowers, the fireplace, he could taste the ice cream that had caught in his mustache. His eyes blinked, and the chocolate candy went into and out of focus, and he knew beyond knowing that he had killed Wodziczko. The tiny man, lovesick for Hugo, must have volunteered to follow him, and Gordon had probably opened the door for him. And Hugo had shot him in the ear, and then shot him through the head with the crossbow. He saw it now from the perspective of memory, which was merciless, for it had as many angles as there were stories to tell.

Hugo was aware how much the house they were in weighed—tons of timber, tons of stone—and how the paint on the walls, the pastoral scene, weighed almost nothing.