Wedding the Pakhan

Inessa Krylov is not a bride. She is an architect, hired to design a house that does not exist on any deed, for a client whose name she is told not to remember. She is halfway through the plans when the previous pakhan's widow puts her name forward as a wife, because Inessa's dead father once held a file that could clear her new husband of three murders. She marries a man she has met four times, professionally. She finishes the house. She finds the file. The problem is what is in it: the name at the bottom is her own uncle, the man who raised her. A winter of questions. Three visits to Moscow. A recorder in a bag. And one morning she hands her husband the tape and asks him, without flinching, to do what needs doing.