She’d exchanged the rest of the Canadian money in the airport and received a total of almost ten thousand hryvnia. This was a lot more money in Ukraine than twelve hundred Canadian would have been in Canada. She could be independent for three months on that money, thinking through what her next move should be, planning how to execute it. She did not have to stay in Ukraine. She could opt never to be found by emigrating to Russia. In Moscow, she could change her name, her looks, her life. This was very appealing. It was desirable. But she could not leave Ukraine without knowing. For a week she lived in a cheap hotel and thought, and ate, and smoked, and slept.

When she felt stronger at the end of that week, she paid 350 hryvnia for a ticket to Lviv and arrived in her hometown late one afternoon. She walked from the station to her and Matthieu’s flat on Doroschenka strasse and simply rang the bell. She did not expect him to answer. She did not expect to find him there. But if he was there, she would know from the instant she saw his face whether he had played a role in what had happened to her, and she would know what to do.

She buzzed again and this time, she heard his voice. “Yes?”

“Matthieu?” she said, feeling an unexpected thrill in her stomach. Maybe it had been a mere terrible dream, a life gone temporarily off course. It could not have been him! Just hearing him say the simple word “Yes” convinced her of this, and she said her own name. There was silence. Then he released the door and she walked in and up the stairs to their flat. He was waiting on the landing, looking perplexed and delighted all at once.

“Laruschka? Oh my goodness, my goodness –” He opened his arms to her and stepped forward to grasp her tightly. Now she could not see his face, and she pushed back to look in his eyes.

“Hello, Matthieu.”

“I don’t understand. Did you … did you quit school? Come in, my goodness, my love, come in! Why did you not call?” He threw the door wide, but she saw he had a worried look on his face, and she could not interpret it. She entered, keeping her eyes open, and she went into the kitchen, where she dropped the satchel she had bought at the airport in Toronto and sat. The kitchen smelled good. Matthieu was making a stew on top of the stove in one of her crockpots. It was an innocent scene. He stood on the other side of the kitchen, in the doorway, studying her. “I don’t understand.”

“You don’t ask me why you haven’t heard from me in ten weeks?”

He pulled his head back sharply on his neck. “What do you mean? We’ve been emailing every other day. Sometimes every day.”

She looked at him with lowered eyes. “I have, have I?”

“What is going on, Larysa?”

“I did not quit school, Matthieu. Does this surprise you?”

“It does. If you did not quit school, then I don’t know what you are doing in our kitchen. I was not expecting you back until the beginning of January!”

“You were not expecting me back until the beginning of January,” she said with a sneer. “How were you expecting me to appear, when I returned at the beginning of January?”

He came to the table and sat down, deeply confused, and took one of her hands in his. “What’s wrong, Laruschka? I’m very happy to see you, but you are angry, and I don’t understand. Tell me how I have upset you.”

His eyes were filled with real concern. “When did I tell you I was coming home in January?”

“My darling, you said if you could get an inexpensive flight home for Christmas, you would come home. You asked me to make you kutia. I said I would.”

She erupted out of her chair. “When? When did I say this? When did we have this discussion?”

Her outburst shocked him and he flung himself back in his chair. “Larysa! What is wrong! You’re frightening me – ”

The knife block was standing on the counter, where it had always been, and she pulled a fish-boning knife from it and held it in front of her. “How much did you get paid, Matthieu? How much did they give you? To treat me like garbage and make me a whore?” Now his face changed, he trembled in his seat with terror; his hands flew to his mouth. He was caught or stunned, she couldn’t tell which and the tears that suddenly flooded his eyes seemed to give her the answer she sought, but could he fake such tears? He stood and she backed away, brandishing the knife, but he was weeping now, wildly, his mouth wide and wet.

“What are you saying!” he wailed. “Laruschka, please tell me what has happened to you!”

He came toward her, fearless of the knife, and his eyes glistened and flowed with feeling that had to be real. She put the knife down and let him close his arms around her. He said quietly in her ear, “No, no, please, what has happened to you?”

It took the rest of the evening for her to tell him her story. When his face was not in his hands, he listened with a terrible, rapt expression. She had forgotten how intensely he paid attention to her. She felt like she was murdering him with her story, but he held up bravely under the onslaught, and emboldened, she told him everything. How she had been treated, her many resolutions to take her own life (and how his face, with authentic grief, had collapsed at this admission), and then, afterwards, what she did when she was free. What she felt she had to do. What she needed to do.

He was moved by the awful choices she’d had to make, for her survival, and he absolved her – as much as a person who loves another person totally can absolve them of a mortal sin.

Then he showed her what she had been to him in the nearly three months she’d been captive. It had not occurred to her that when they had taken her laptop and her phone from her that they would have access to a rich supply of personal information they could use to cover their tracks. Email addresses of friends, colleagues, and family. Her password was saved in her browser, all they had to do was collect her email, pay any bills that came up (it was nothing compared to what she was bringing in for them), and reply to messages that clearly needed replies. He had almost sixty emails from her, and more than a third of them came with pictures of Toronto, supposedly pictures of school and her friends, a couple of images of herself taken by Tate or Bochko in which she had been told to smile and look happy or else. She’d understood these images were going to be used for the website, but now she saw their application had been much wider. It was astonishing to think of the difference between her life and that of her virtual doppelgänger.

“Do you understand?” he asked her, holding her on the couch. “Don’t you know I would have done anything to help you if I’d known you were in trouble? My god, my god,” he said. “I can’t stop thinking about it – ”

“Don’t try,” she said. “I can’t be alone in my memories.”

“I am here, Larysa,” he said, and he kissed her eyes.

______

He had made the stew to last him a few days, but he served it with reverence to her that night, putting heaping spoonfuls of it onto her plate. He went out and got the best vodka he could find, and they ate and drank themselves into a stupour. They went into bed almost comatose with food, drink, and relief, and Matthieu fell asleep right away. He was never one to hold his vodka. He had not touched her at all, except to hold her and console her, and now she lay in his arms and felt his warm breath on her neck.

Despite her full belly and her drunkenness, she could not sleep. Or perhaps because of it she remained painfully wakeful. She lay in the bed, alert, feeling the city of her childhood go through its nighttime motions, cars and the voices of people in the street, the slightly yeasty smell of the bread factory nearby, and the cry of the soccer fans in the stadium on Kleparivs’ka strasse. She hadn’t grown up here, but she knew the streets like she knew herself. That thought led to another one, as she lay on her side with Matthieu’s arm around her belly, looking at the streetlight coming through the window. The thought was that she could not be that person anymore, that self she’d known like the streets of Lviv. There was no actual life to return to. She was a victim of crime and a criminal herself. She would not be able to escape this truth, even if she told no other person than Matthieu about it.