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realized that he’d gotten up sometime during the night to scribble on it. Where had he worked? The bathroom, or had he snuck down to the hotel bar?
    Novi Sad, she saw, was a town in the north of Yugoslavia, on the banks of the Danube, not so far from the Hungarian border. To the west, he’d circled another town, also along the Danube, called Vukovar, just inside Croatia, though on their map Croatia did not exist. He pointed at it. “There’s fighting right there.”
    Sophie knew the name. For nearly a month, Vukovar had suffered under a continuous rain of artillery by the JNA, the Jugoslav National Army. “It’s not too close?” she asked.
    “I’m not suggesting we go to the fighting, Sophie. We get to Novi Sad, and we settle in for a week. We keep our ears open; we see what we can see.”
    “To what end?”
    He stared at her a moment, as if he only now realized that he’d married an imbecile. Or maybe he was asking himself the same question. He smiled and opened his hands. “To go. To see. To experience.”
    They were only twenty-two.
    It was a straightforward enough proposition, but Sophie saw it as a life-changing decision. She was right to think of it like that, for in a way the decision redirected their shared life. At the time, though, she couldn’t predict any of this. It was simply the first test of their marriage. Either she would encourage her husband’s sense of adventure, or she would take the initial steps toward clipping his wings. She was already thinking more like a wife than the independent woman she’d always told herself she was.
    She was also thinking of that boy in Prague. She was no wiser a week later, but her eyes were a little more open, and she was beginning to understand how ridiculous she had looked among those gray, historically miserable people with her dollars and her American smile and her little trinket of communist kitsch. She didn’t want to be like that anymore. She, like Emmett, wanted to be someone who’d seen things, and not just on television. She was beginning to think of her friends in Boston as cloistered, just as she had been. While her courage faltered occasionally, she knew that she wanted to be different from them. She wanted to be authentic. She wanted to know. She said, “Sure, hon. Let’s go look at a war.”

 
    5
    Thursday was full of visitors. Fiona was ready with coffee and eggs when Sophie rose around noon, and soon afterward Mary Saunders, the ambassador, called to tell her that everything was being done to track down the cretin who had shot Emmett. “Like what?” Sophie asked.
    Perhaps noting the tone in her voice, the ambassador hesitated. Or maybe this was just Sophie’s imagination, for she felt as if she’d woken a different woman from the night before. The grief and guilt remained, but she’d woken angry—angry that some thick-necked bastard had been able to walk into a restaurant and end life as she’d known it. She was angry for Emmett, because he hadn’t had the chance for his “little shit” moment, and that was something he had deserved. She was angry with Stan, because she wasn’t sure she believed him, and she was livid with Zora Balašević, who had destroyed her marriage long before that gunman had destroyed Emmett. Most of all, she was angry with herself for being so much less than she could have been.
    Mary Saunders listed the law enforcement and security agencies who were “on top of this” and told her that she should expect to have to answer some questions for them. “Of course,” Sophie said, “but is this a two-way street?”
    “Excuse me?”
    “Are they going to answer my questions?”
    “I’m sure they’ll be as helpful as they can be, Sophie.”
    Afterward, she received a call from Harry Wolcott—a colleague of Emmett’s in Cairo, and Stan’s Agency boss. He offered breathy, muddled condolences. Sophie appreciated that the man was emotional and confused, but that wasn’t much use to her now. She wanted