Where are you, my love?

She breathed quietly, letting loose her thoughts. When something in her mind unknotted, she knew she’d been looking for the wrong thing. Slowly she retraced her steps, scanning the ground this time instead of the Muscovites at leisure, and she saw the sign when she was back where she’d started. She smiled and felt a whisper of wind ruffle her hair. The sign was a tiny pile of stones, so small it was barely noticeable. But Lydia knew. Knew without doubt. When she and Chang had been separated in China, they had left messages for each other in a place called Lizard Creek and those messages had been buried in a jar beneath a cairn of stones. This, she realised, was her new Lizard Creek.

She crouched down and scrabbled at the stones. The miniature cairn had been placed in a corner of one of the flowerbeds where the soil was not so compacted under its skin of ice. It broke up quickly under her fingers and she found a small fold of leather. Inside it lay a slip of paper. In delicate black script were written six words: At the end of Semenov Ulitsa. Six words that altered her world.

She glanced round quickly but nothing had changed. A young woman wheeling her bicycle, an elderly couple throwing crumbs like confetti for a flock of starlings whose wings fluttered an oily black in the sunlight. Lydia piled the small cairn back together, rose to her feet, brushed her fingers on her coat and slipped the paper deep in her pocket. Her hand wouldn’t release its grasp but lay there, curled round it. She started to walk at a steady pace along the path once more, but her feet wouldn’t wait. They picked up speed, lengthening her stride and, before she could stop them, they were running.

Semenov Street was near the river. Set in the southern part of the city, it might have been transplanted straight out of one of the villages Lydia had viewed from the train on her journey across Russia. The houses were simple, a jumble of wooden one-storey buildings tilting at different angles under patched and mossy roofs.

The road was nothing more than a mix of potholes and dirt, but today it was bustling with people. A street market filled up most of the walkway, goods displayed on mats thrown on the ground. One stall boasted neat rows of second-hand boots, each one moulded to the shape of the previous owner’s life, jostling between displays of paper flowers and buckets of rusty metal clamps and washers. None of the traders had licences. If the police turned up to check they would melt away faster than ice on the tongue. Lydia was thankful for all the activity. She slid unnoticed along the street.

‘Apples? Good clean apples?’

‘Nyet.’

A woman had thrust a shrivelled yellow apple under her nose. Lydia was tempted as she’d not eaten since a mouthful of the kasha she’d cooked for the boy this morning. The woman looked thin and tired under her headscarf, but then so did everyone else. It was the way things were. Two woven baskets stood at her side, apples in one, nuts in the other, both protected from the cold by a woollen shawl. A handful of the better samples lay on top to tempt passing trade.

On impulse Lydia snatched up two of the apples and handed over ten kopecks from the dwindling supply in her pocket, before she darted off down the road to where it came to an end. Beyond it lay a wild bushy stretch of commonland that nestled in a lazy loop of the Moskva River. It looked as though it would be marshy in the spring, which was probably why it hadn’t been built on, but right now the ground was hard as iron and covered with brown spiky grass that pushed up like fingers through the glistening snow.

Lydia set off across it. She was startled by the unexpected sight of a dirty-white circus tent over to one side, flags flapping halfheartedly from its topmost ridge, while down towards the river was a stand of birch and alder trees and a maze of bushes that, even in winter, created a dense screen of cover. She couldn’t see Chang An Lo. Not yet. But she knew he was here as surely as she knew her next breath would whiten the air in front of her.

There were no paths, so she walked in a straight line across the snow and brittle grass, crunching it beneath her feet as she headed towards the birch trees. Their naked branches reached out like pale spiders’ legs against the startling blue of the sky, and she felt something trembling inside her. What if he’d changed? What if nothing was the same? What if he’d travelled too far for her to reach him this time? The back of her throat tasted coppery, yet she couldn’t stop her lips smiling broadly or her cheeks flushing, despite the cold.

She stepped in among the slender tree trunks and, though the temperature abruptly dropped a few degrees in the shadows, she felt the heat of her body rise. She unbuttoned her coat. Her eyes scanned the undergrowth, but the only living creature she saw was a grey-faced jackdaw that bobbed its head up and down at her. She pushed further into the strip of woodland, picking her way deep into the gloomiest spots where concealment would be easiest. Every few steps she stood still, listening intently. But all she could hear was the distant murmur of water and the fretting of the wind in the branches.

Yet suddenly he was there. Tall and slender, graceful as the mottled trunks of the birches. That same intent stillness in the way he looked at her. She’d caught no sound of footfalls, no rustle of bushes, but now she could hear his breath, see its white trail from his lips and it came as fast as her own.

‘ Lydia,’ he said in a whisper.

She didn’t speak. She was gazing at his face, at his full mouth, his beautiful almond eyes. At the long strong throat and the line of his hair brushed back from his forehead, silky and black. It stole from her tongue all the words she had prepared. She reached out. He could be a phantom and this could be another of the dreams that tormented and tantalised her each night. She could be asleep in her bed, with Liev Popkov yawning like a hippopotamus on the other side of the curtain.

He touched her cheek. His fingers rested there and she leaned against them, the weight of her head in his palm. A murmur escaped her lips, a wordless sigh that shuddered up from deep within her, and without warning his arms curled around her. He held her so tight against his chest that neither could breathe. His hand pulled off her hat, dropped it to the ground and cradled the back of her head, fingers moving in the dense waves of her hair. A low moan rose from his lungs and brushed the skin of her temple.

They stood like that. No words. No kisses. No greeting. Unaware of where they were. And when they’d been still so long that a vole scuttled past their feet, pattering over the black loam, Chang An Lo lifted his head and smiled at her.

‘My love,’ he said softly, ‘you have brought my soul back to me.’

She kissed him. Breathed in his breath, tasted his tongue. Grew aware of his hunger for her. She felt her skin come alive again, though until this moment she hadn’t even realised it was dead.

They walked, arms close around each other’s waists, hips touching, feeling their bones and muscles relearning how to be one instead of two. Back across the patchy grass and over the trodden snow, towards the circus tent where people were milling around.

A moment earlier, when they had sat down on Chang’s coat in a buttery patch of sunlight slanting through the trees, a man in leather trousers with four children, all twig-thin, had come barging through the undergrowth gathering firewood. He was bundling it up with the help of the swarthy urchins into a stack on his back, held there by a leather strap. From their colourful garb and bright neckerchiefs Lydia guessed they were part of the circus. Chang had put a finger to Lydia ’s lips. It smelled clean and fresh, and she’d kissed the knot of scarred flesh where his little finger used to be. The man didn’t even see them but his presence was enough to dispel the sense of privacy, so they’d risen to their feet, picked up her hat and reluctantly emerged from the shelter of the trees.