“I should have known I’d find you out here away from everyone,” I said to Kostia’s back, wandering out to join him as I motioned Yuri to stay on the bank. My partner was smoking a Lucky Strike; we’d both taken to American cigarettes, so he lit another off his own and passed it to me. We stood looking over the water for a quarter hour’s companionable silence, smoke drifting up from our cupped hands.
“Three,” he said at last.
“Three,” I agreed. “Bathing shed—”
“Back behind the tree line—”
“And among the reeds on the far bank.” I narrowed my eyes at the spot, mentally planning a foxhole. “Hard to keep your weapon dry there.”
“Good thing we don’t have to shoot anyone this morning.”
I finished the cigarette, grinding the butt under my heel as I looked at the row of small boats. “When I was a child in Belaya Tserkov, my sister and I took a flat-bottomed rowboat out on the river sometimes. We called it the Cossack Oak, pretended we were rowing to the North Pole to find Morozko.” I remembered telling Kostia in Odessa how he reminded me of the winter god from old times, snow-silent and dangerous. I cleared my throat, nudging the nearest craft—a narrow leather-covered thing with two short paddles that I was fairly certain Americans called a canoe. “Shall we try it? The First Lady did say to make ourselves at home.”
Kostia jumped down into the canoe before I was done speaking.
I took the seat behind him as he gave us a push off the dock. “Only room for two!” I shouted toward Yuri just in case he had any thought of joining us, and we got our paddles in a rhythm, aiming for deeper water. I enjoyed the burning in my shoulders even if I did favor the unscarred side, savoring the glassy expanse of water and the rustle of reeds. “Lyonya would have liked this,” I found myself saying. I could almost see him here in the canoe with us, fair hair ruffling in the wind.
“He didn’t like water,” Kostia said over his shoulder. “I used to tease him about that.”
“Oh.” Something I hadn’t known about the man I thought of as my second husband. In my mind’s eye he reached out and tucked a lock of hair behind my ear. There are a lot of things you didn’t get a chance to know about me, milaya.
And now I never would. I’d missed my chance—my second chance at love, the world giving me Lyonya after I’d made such a monumental mistake in my first attempt at marriage. You hardly ever got a second shot after missing your first; life as a sniper had taught me that, but the world had been kind enough to give me one and I’d missed that, too . . .
“Mrs. Roosevelt says there’s a very fine library at the house,” I said just to be saying something. “I could use some new books to read, to practice my English. Maybe we can find you something other than War and Peace.”
Kostia’s shoulders continued to flex and relax, flex and relax as he swept his paddle through the water. “I’m going back to Washington tomorrow.”
I blinked. “You’re leaving the delegation?”
“Only for a few days. I’ll make a private fuss to Krasavchenko that it doesn’t sit well with me, staying in a presidential palace built on the backs of the masses, and ask to go back to the embassy for the rest of the week.” A brief thread of amusement laced his voice. “The real reason . . . I mean to take a day in New York City, on my way to catch the New York–Washington express.”
“New York City?”
He stopped paddling, and the canoe drifted to a halt in the middle of the glassy mirror of water. “My grandmother. Remember the one I told you about?”
The American girl who had come to Russia before the revolution with a missionary group, full of romantic ideas about Siberian snows and white nights, marrying a revolutionary and staying behind. I nodded, remembering the night he’d trusted me with that story—a forest camp outside Sevastopol, celebrating with Vartanov and the rest of our platoon when they’d all still been alive and laughing. Strange to think I’d nearly forgotten Kostia was part American, though he’d spent the last few weeks among Americans, deploying his fluent English instead of his rifle.