dark shoulder-length hair, a narrow face, large eyes, a slightly upturned nose. She was laughing and holding a little girl, maybe a year old.
Marina dried her hands on a dish towel and picked up the photo. “That was my daughter,” Gregory said. “Tanya Tarasevich. She disappeared twenty-four years ago.
She was five. Her mother took her. I searched. Hired people. Filed reports. Traveled from city to city.
Nothing.” Marina kept looking at the photograph. The woman in it seemed to be looking back at her.
“But that isn’t Tanya,” Gregory went on. “That’s Tanya’s mother. My first wife, Irene.” Marina looked up. “I need to ask you something,” Gregory said.
“Was your mother’s name Irene?” “My mother’s name was Irene,” Marina said. “She died when I was fourteen.”
“Last name?” “Lapshin. From her second husband. She married him when I was three.”
Gregory closed his eyes, then opened them again. “And before Lapshin?”
“I don’t know. She never said. I asked, and she wouldn’t tell me.
She just said, ‘You don’t need that. You have me.’” Gregory slid the photo closer. “Look at her carefully.”
Marina did. The woman in the picture looked like her—not in the vague way strangers sometimes resemble each other, but in the concrete way mothers and daughters do. Same shape of face. Same eyes. Same tilt of the head.
The mug Marina was holding slipped from her hand and hit the floor. It broke into three pieces. Tea spread across the linoleum.
“This…”
