After I refused to answer his questions, Anton hardly spoke to me. Neither of us slept for the remainder of the night. I curled into the fetal position and prayed for him to touch me. My back ached for the pressure of his chest, my waist longed for the weight of his arm, and my feet were icy cold without the warmth of his.

At dawn, I crawled out of the bed, packed, swallowed a coffee, and showered. As soon as I exited the bathroom, Anton went in, barking as he walked past me that a taxi would take me to the airport in half an hour.

I picked up my suitcase, shoved the thick envelope he’d left on top of it into my purse, and rushed out to wait in the lobby.

It’s been one month and six days since that Parisian weekend.

Anton hasn’t reached out through Filip or to me directly. My heart still hiccups every time I get a call from an unknown number. But, invariably, it’s a telemarketer or pollster.

Life’s gone back to normal.

I haven’t been sleeping very well, and I’m always tired and apathetic. When people notice, I blame the protracted winter. My pharmacist friend Nadya has gotten me a huge bottle of vitamin D pills. She calls it the “sunshine vitamin” and says it’ll energize me. I wish there were a pill you could take to erase selected memories and a specific person from your mind. I wish there were a pill to silence the stupid heart when it won’t listen to reason.

Mom has started her radiotherapy, and her blood work has been improving with every test. She’s put on a few much needed kilos. Her complexion is no longer gray.

On top of that, she’s rekindled a bunch of old friendships, and I often catch her smiling without any obvious reason.

Filip’s unconventionally entrepreneurial mind has hatched a new income stream for us. He’s made arrangements with a fertility clinic to which he’s now selling his sperm and I’m about to sell my eggs. Who could’ve guessed those tiny ovules, wasted on me month after month, could fetch enough to pay my rent? Filip is now carping about sperm being dirt cheap compared to eggs and dropping transparent hints that I should give him a cut for having come up with the idea.

Earlier this week, I asked him to keep my Sunday free. Not that I’ve grown complacent, but I really need to have a day away from everything and everyone—my day job, my night job, my clients, my friends, and even my mom.

It’s a day to stay in my pj’s, catch up on my reading, and treat myself to a Pride and Prejudice rerun on TV.

Which should start in exactly ten minutes.

I’m in the kitchen fixing myself a bowl of chocolate ice cream when a sound of shattering glass makes me jump. I walk over to the window and survey the courtyard. No broken glass, but a large icicle that has detached itself from the roof gutter, hit the ground and burst into pieces, its collision with cobblestones no longer cushioned by snow.

Spring is here at last.

A group of sparrows splash about in a large puddle and chirp at the top of their shrill voices, making sure all three buildings around the courtyard know how much fun they’re having. Rows of happily flapping sheets and towels underline all the windows across from mine. I glance down at the flowerbeds in the middle of the wet yard. A scattering of snowdrops and crocuses have pushed through the dirty snow, their creamy heads high and their green stems tall and proud.

Yes, spring is officially here.

I open the window and fill my lungs with air. It smells of sun, wind, leaf buds, and new beginnings.

It smells of life.

“Petya, I want you home right now! Don’t make me come down there, young man!” a woman with curlers in her hair shouts in the building across the yard.

She waves her finger at someone downstairs and contorts her innocuous snub-nosed face into a threatening expression.

I follow her gaze to a little boy in full winter gear and rubber boots.

He lifts his head and begs, “Mama, please, five more minutes!”

“That’s it, I’m coming down to get you!”

The boy drops his head, discards the twig he’s been playing with, and shuffles inside.

He must be five or six—about Sasha’s age.

Shit. I should’ve known better than to allow that thought.

The floodgates open at once, and all the impossible questions rush into my defenseless brain.

Is Sasha happy now? What does he look like? Do his adoptive parents give him all the care and love every child deserves? Did they change his name?

Painful, pointless questions.

I’m usually good at blocking them out, but sometimes I can’t help myself.

It seems that now is one of those times.

When I discovered I was pregnant, I thought I would explode with joy. I couldn’t wait to tell Stan. He’d told me so many times how much he loved kids and how he dreamed of having his own one day. With me.

His expression was a little strange when he heard the news, but he took me into his arms and said he was happy. I spent the next three months in a blissful cocoon, shopping for baby clothes and choosing names.

When I was five months along, Stan dumped me with a one-sentence text message. At first I thought it was a bad joke, but then he quit the school, changed his phone number, and disappeared into his rich boys’ universe to which I had no access.

Somehow, I managed to get a hold of one of his buddies.

He told me about the wager. Stan had bet his best friend a lot of money that he’d not only deflower Moscow’s last virgin but he would also knock her up. The reason he’d stuck around for the last three months was to make sure I didn’t get an abortion, and he had solid proof—my protruding belly and ultrasound images of the fetus—to validate his win.

Four months later, I delivered a healthy baby boy and gave him up for adoption.

Men are animals, as Mom says.

I agree. Stan, for one, is a certified hyena.

Anton… Anton is a wolf. He’s devoted to his family, loyal to his pack, and ruthless to outsiders.

Which is exactly what I am—an outsider.

I can’t afford to fall in love again.

I really, really can’t.

Because love is a professional jailer.

It locks you up in a cell, shackles you to the wall, reduces your world to the confines of your dungeon and rips the wings from all your plans, dreams, and desires that it deems irrelevant. You end up a single-minded wreck, your entire being—mind, body, and soul—focused on one man, your brain in a fog, and your thoughts in a muddle. You become a zombie oblivious to that man’s blatant lies, to his control over your life, to the obliteration of your personality…

To the hopelessness of it all.