"There's your answer," Katya says. "Brianna was sleeping with Mikael and you and god knows who else."

"Let us test your gut." Baba stands and crosses to his desk. "Come, Petr."

"Baba, he needs more than a coin toss!" Katya objects.

"Stay, Katya."

I snort and rise, following my father to his desk.

"When Katya married Sawyer, she gave him your grandfather's wedding ring to welcome him to the family," my father starts. "You remember?"

"Of course."

"I was saving this for Mikael, since he was the older of you boys." Baba pulls a small, velvet jewelry pouch from his desk. "To test your gut. Answer the question: does this change your mind?"

"Are you flipping rare coins this time?" I smile, familiar with his techniques for helping us make decisions as kids. Whatever our intuition told us when the coin's face was revealed was the truth, according to Baba.

"Not coins." He dumps the contents of the pouch into his hand and closes his fist before I can see it. "What is the question?"

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"I got it, Baba," I say, amused. "Does this change my mind. We've played this game for years."

"Except, today, it's not a game." Baba opens his fist to reveal what he's holding. "Answer quickly," he orders.

I stop breathing for a moment, my heart taking off. "No. It doesn't." No part of me objects. If anything, the choice seems even simpler.

"How does it feel?"

"Right. Natural."

"There it is then. Decision made." He appears pleased. He replaces it in the pouch and hands it to me. "Now go tell your brother." His work done, my father returns to his place at the hearth with Katya, who's waiting curiously to hear what's going on.

The familiar sense of flying towards a mission comes over me: exhilaration mixed with the kind of calm, brutal clarity fueled by adrenaline. It causes the world to slow down to the point where I can take in every last detail of my environment before the chaos of a mission erupts. I open the pouch once more and remove its single inhabitant.

My mother's engagement ring. It's plain considering her wealth, bought for her by a man on a soldier's budget in a country and time where luxuries such as this probably cost him a year's wages at least. She was buried with her wedding ring, I knew, but I never considered her engagement ring or that Baba was saving it for Mikael's bride.

Understanding his intention gives the simple solitaire even more importance. Baba had met all my girlfriends and Mikael's over the years and never once mentioned this. He knows what I do: that the right person makes all the wrong ones seem so obviously incompatible, it's painful. It's moments like this when I don't doubt my father was a damned good spy chief capable of assessing a person like no other.




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