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heard this from someone else, it would have been a simple thing for her to deny it into the ground. Emmett would have been relieved, and she would have been free of at least some of this crushing guilt. She said, “He sounded convincing.”
    “I don’t know what to tell you, Sophie. I haven’t talked to him since your going-away party.”
    She digested this slowly, finally saying, “Okay. I believe you.”
    “I hope so. Now, do you want me to come? It’s no problem at all.”
    “No, Stan. Really. Thanks, though. I just need to sleep.”
    “Can I call you tomorrow?”
    “Sure.”
    She hung up and, after considering it a moment, dialed the other number, the one she still knew by heart, though her heart was in her throat when she pressed the buttons. A single ring, then a recorded voice told her something in Arabic. Sophie didn’t know the language but she knew the tone—the number had been disconnected. Of course. She hung up and turned off the phone again. Yet even with that done, she still couldn’t sleep.

 
    4
    1991
    After Prague they moved on to Budapest and the drearily aristocratic Gellért Hotel. With the memory of that Czech boy and her stolen Lenin still fresh, Sophie shied away from tourist spots, preferring to sit with Emmett in dusty Hungarian cafés on streets called Vaci and Andrassy, reading the Herald Tribune and pretending to be locals. It didn’t work, for their clothes gave them away, and as soon as they opened their mouths they received shocked stares, but it did give them time to read and learn about the war bubbling just to the south, in Yugoslavia.
    In late June, Croatia and Slovenia had declared their independence from the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and after a brief ten-day war Slovenia had become sovereign. By September, as they huddled over their newspapers, the young Croatian republic had been fighting for its existence for two months.
    “It’s the biggest news since the Berlin Wall,” Emmett told her in their hotel room as they watched grainy television images of bombs and talking heads. “And we’re right here, one country away.” She could feel his excitement.
    During breakfast, their waitress told them in spotty English that Budapest was swelling from an influx of Yugoslavs—mostly Serbs—fleeing military conscription, smuggling goods across the loose borders, and escaping the prospect of an unknown future. “Criminals,” she said with undisguised contempt, but this only added to their vision of themselves as explorers into the unknown. At a bar in Liszt Ferenc Square they listened to a drunk young Serbian man ranting in English to a table of Hungarians about how Slobodan Milošević and Franjo Tuđman were preparing to “set fire to the Balkans, you mark my words.”
    The tension in the air, whether real or imagined, added a new dimension to their honeymoon, and on the white Gellért sheets they tangled and fought as if their room had caught fire and this was their last chance for connection. Sophie lost track of herself during sex; this kind of exhilaration was new to her. While a part of her was terrified by the loss of control, when she saw the look of pure satisfaction on Emmett’s face her fear faded away.
    On September 18, two days before their scheduled return to Boston, Emmett suggested they travel south. “We missed the Wall, Sophie. You really want to miss this?”
    She didn’t know. They were at breakfast again in the Gellért dining room, and she was tired. A part of her longed to get back to their friends in Boston, where they could understand the language again and spread tall tales of their adventures; another part was enchanted by the idea, recently hatched, that this honeymoon could be the first step of a journey that would take them around the world.
    “We can go down to Novi Sad,” Emmett said as he pulled out the regional map they’d only used a couple of times. Now, she saw, there were pencil circles around cities, and she