“I don’t know . . .” Stepan had never been a man who suffered from anxiety, but he felt a knot in his stomach when he thought about this conversation. He had decided in bed the night before how he would begin.

“I’m around today so I can set it up for you,” Misha persisted. “Shall I say eleven our time?”

An hour to go. Was he really going to do this? “All right,” Stepan agreed, and sat down to his cup of coffee.

An hour later, he perched upright in the chair in front of the screen while Misha typed in the address and they waited for a connection. There was a buzzing sound as one computer tried to talk to another on the opposite side of the world, and Stepan marveled at that. He jumped when Val’s face appeared full-size on the screen. It was slightly blurred but obviously the same woman he had met. She was smiling, her eyes merry.

“Hi there!” she said, her voice as clear as if she was in the next room. “What a surprise to hear from you!”

Stepan took a deep breath before he spoke. “Hello, little sister,” he said. “I think I owe you an explanation.”

Acknowledgments

I’m hugely grateful to my legendary agent, Vivien Green at Sheil Land, and my foreign rights agent, Gaia Banks; thanks to them, my books have now been sold in a staggering twenty countries. The crack team at my US publisher—Lucia Macro, Asanté Simons, Jennifer Hart, Amelia Wood, Danielle Bartlett, and Jean Marie Kelly—are a force of nature, positively bursting with energy and enthusiasm, and I feel very fortunate to be published by them.

Some brilliant advisors helped with this novel. Dave Yorath explained to me in detail how old cameras worked, in particular the Kodak Autographic, and he showed me what 1918 film developed in the 1970s might look like. Paula Grainger suggested the herbal remedies that Peter might have used, checking Russian sources to make sure they were available in the season and the part of the country that my plot required. Gerrie Fletcher, a longtime Sydney resident, checked the details of Val’s life there, as well as the Australian characters’ dialogue. Ben Balliger, an attorney and graduate in Russian history from the School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies at University College London, checked the Russian sections. I’m incredibly grateful for their help but must emphasize that if any errors have crept in, they are mine alone.