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“The ordinary things are worse,” he murmured.

I looked up. He was staring into the pot, but he wasn’t seeing it.

“What do you remember?” I asked.

For a while, I thought he might not answer. Then he returned to the dough, divided it into four equal pieces without weighing them, and began rolling out the first one.

“Mama believed luck was a family responsibility,” he said. “Whenever one of us had something important—a first day, an exam, a meeting with our father—she lined up five pairs of shoes across the front hall.”

“Why?”

“She said luck would become confused if it didn’t know which son to follow, so all five of us had to step over them. Right foot first. Maxim went first, being the eldest. Nikolai once jumped over the entire row and nearly broke a lamp. Ivan asked whether left-handed people were required to use the opposite foot. Aleksei tried to walk around.”

“What did you do?”

“I made them start over before Mama found the wooden spoon,” he replied, smirking.

I laughed, and Sergei’s smile appeared. It changed his whole face, taking some of the severity from his mouth and making the green of his eyes look warmer.

For a while after that, we worked side by side, rolling dough, cutting circles, filling them, and folding each small dumpling shut. The ones I made looked a little deformed.

Sergei picked it up between two fingers. “This will open in the water.”

“It has character.”

“It has structural weaknesses.”

“Stop judging him. He’s doing his best.”

Sergei smiled, fixed the seal with one press of his thumb, and placed it beside the others. I made another one, and it was far better than the last one.

“The woman in the photograph,” I said quietly. “You said her name was Mila, right?”

His hands stopped.

“Yes.”

“You loved her.”

It wasn’t a question, but he answered anyway.

“I intended to marry her.”

The words carried no hesitation, nor did he attempt to reduce what she had been so I would feel less threatened by it, and a big part of me appreciated that.

“Had you asked her?”

“No.” He lowered his eyes to the dough between his fingers. “I kept waiting for the perfect time, but it never came.”

I remained quiet, my eyes on his face.

“After Moscow, I struck a Volkov cash house in Brighton Beach,” he continued. “Took the money. Burned the records. Put two of Yuri’s men in the hospital.”

“You expected him to come after you.”

“I did.”

“But he went after her instead,” I guessed.