I explain about the hacker and what the redacted file probably meant.

“Okay, so we need to solve this.” She rips out a page from a notebook on her desk and grabs a purple gel pen. “Tell me everything you know. Leave nothing out.”

“Olivia, we don’t have to do this right now—”

“Nope, don’t even try to talk me out of this. I need this right now. We’re going to solve this, okay? Now, when did you find the journal?”

I get it. Helping me figure out Gram’s past helps distract her from what’s happening right now with her parents.

“Um, the journal? Oh, Gram mentioned it one day, and I got curious about what was in it. I didn’t think it would be anything like this!”

Olivia looks up with a frown. “Wait? You stole your grandmother’s journal for no reason?”

I sigh. I decide right then to tell her a small part of the truth. It’s the least she deserves after the way I’ve treated her. “When Gram gets tired, she, um, gets this weird accent. I wasn’t sure what it was. And she started telling me these stories about her childhood, but they didn’t add up to what I’ve been told my whole life. I thought I should, you know, investigate.”

“What stories?” Olivia puts her pen to the paper and waits.

I tell her everything I can without revealing the secret of Gram’s memory. Or mine.

“What else?” She looks up expectantly. “Anything more tied to Russia?”

I squint. A niggle of something prods at one of my memory squares.

“What?” She waves her pen dramatically. “You’re doing that thing where you blank out and then all of a sudden know a ton of stuff.”

“Her doctor,” I say in a rush. “Her doctor is a friend, and I’m pretty sure his name is Russian.”

“What’s his name?”

I close my eyes and toggle through the movie of yesterday. Gram was wearing her beige sweater with the blue butterflies. “Yakov is his first name, but that’s all I know about him.”

“That’s not a lot,” she mutters.

“I mean, I know where his office is, though.”

Olivia rolls her eyes at me. “Duh, Lulu. That’s huge!” She shoves her notebook and pens in one of her twenty thousand backpacks and tugs a brush through her tangles. “Come on, let’s go.”

“Where are we going?” But I already know. She’s got that determined Olivia look in her eyes.

“His office! We’re going to find out exactly how he knows your gram. What if he’s the man from the woods?” She raises her eyebrows.

“He can’t be,” I say, but I’m not as confident as I sound. “She ran away from that guy. This guy is a friend.”

“We’ll see.”