## Emil POV *Are you sure about this?* He asked, frowning, with that look of concern and mistrust and fondness in his eyes. The look that he had so frequently regarded me with over the years, the decades. The look that I tried to find but couldn’t, when he scolded me and I pleaded with him, on this long, dark Halloween night in peaceful, unremarkable Marlowe. Something remembered out of the blue. We were children, then. Weathering the harsh winters on the other side of the Iron Curtain, and trying to have some fun—him dragging a small rickety sled up the side of a small mound, myself following behind. He was bigger than me in those days, yet his entire figure still appeared so miniscule in the infinitely stretching fields of gleaming white snow. At the top of the mound he turned back and asked me, *Are you sure about this?* His small face, almost buried between the ushanka and the muffler, was red from the cold. He always had to be a few steps ahead of me. Always had to lead by example. Always had to make sure that I wasn’t inadvertently putting myself—and by extension, him—in harm’s way. I had loved him so much even then, but he would never know now.