Spending years in relative isolation, barely exchanging names with anyone else let alone more information has had an odd effect on Anya. She's better than she was, but she spent so much time encasing herself in a shell, only ever exchanging the barest of pleasantries with those she saw regularly that she lost touch with how to do it. Vlad and Dmitry were different. They knew her, seemed to know who she really was and believe it. It might have been nothing more than an elaborate con, a long-haul game that turned out to be true, but the effect was the same. She started to let people in again. No matter what happened, no matter how many hurt feelings, they were people that she cared about.

How can she even begin to explain that to Gleb? That Dmitry and Gleb exist in different realms to her. Dmitry was a possibility built on a fantasy, on a shared memory of a sunny day nearly twenty years ago. That she loved the prickly parts of him just as she was frustrated and confused by them. He had lied to her, lied about her, avoided her. Her love for Gleb has a different shape, comes from a different place. He makes her heartbeat quicken, her blood burn with warmth, not rage.

Perhaps what she is grieving for most of all is the loss of her friend. The loss of yet another tie to Russia. "I know it does. That people come and go without reason. It doesn't make any sense after everything that happened, but he was another part of Russia that is gone," she bites her lip, wringing her hand absently before stilling herself. "It feels like I banished him with my anger."