Chapter 105

Somehow, I think I got used to the idea that Ivan would never communicate again.

By mid-April, television had stopped reporting on him and the media seemed satisfied with their hunger for information. Occasionally, a note on the Internet would talk about Illya at an engineering convention in Europe, or at a conference by VLC Engineering CEO Mikhail. Not being surrounded by people who mentioned his name helped me not think about Ivan so much, and one day, in the end, I think I convinced myself that it was all over. I didn’t believe that he had broken his promise, but I tried to see it as a favor he was doing me, perhaps out of a desire to protect me, perhaps because I had finally resigned myself to believing that I was wishing for something impossible.

We didn’t owe each other anything. Absolutely nothing.

In the first days of May, with the rewritten manuscript of the end of my first saga already edited and ready to go into production, Eric phoned me from London to