None of us could believe it at first. News this horrible was the stuff of nightmares, the dark mechanisms of an overactive imagination. Surely we would soon hear that it had all been a mistake, that in reality they were all alive and safe, in hiding somewhere.

Yet in the end, we were forced to accept that it had really happened. Nicholas and Alexandra, their three younger daughters and son, the family doctor, and three servants had been herded into the basement of the house in which they'd been held prisoner and shot to death by the Bolsheviks.

"No! No! No!" Olga screamed, her eyes darting back and forth like those of a trapped animal searching for an escape route.

"Darling..." Vova tried to embrace her, but she wrenched free from his grasp and dashed to the bedroom, where she threw herself across the bed, her body convulsing with sobs. "Poor, dear Alexei...they made him bleed...they made Alexei bleed again..."

Vova continued to try to comfort her, and she continued to reject his overtures, until suddenly she grasped her abdomen as her eyes grew wide with alarm. "The baby...it's coming!"

Vova paled. "But it isn't due for weeks!"

"I know...but it's coming...now!"

Quickly I shooed Vova out of the way and enlisted Katya, Liza, and Sadie to help me prepare for the imminent birth. Katya, only days younger than her cousin, had always been very close to Olga. Now she held the frightened, grief-stricken young woman's hand as she tried her best to comfort her. "It's going to be all right...everything's going to be all right..."

As Olga groaned and strained, I helped her get into position to give birth. "Push, Olga...that's it...one more time...good..."

I prepared to catch the babe, and suddenly it lay in my hands, covered in blood.

The poor little thing never drew its first breath. Its face ended abruptly right above its eyes, its head lacking both skull and brain, the top instead covered by some kind of grotesque membrane. Its back was split open like a ruptured vegetable, its spine completely exposed. Struggling to control the acute nausea that gripped me, I quickly wrapped the pitiful little body in a clean towel and took it to Rufus, who was waiting just outside the door.

"Take it away!" I hissed fiercely. "Burn it!"

"Yes 'm." His own eyes were wide with horrified wonder as well.

"My baby!" Olga wailed. "I want to see my baby!"

Quickly I rushed to her side. "There was no baby," I lied. "Only big clots of blood."

"There was a baby!" Olga was sobbing now, hard. "I felt it come out of me!"

"Listen, sweetheart," I said, grasping her hands and gazing into her eyes. "It was far too early, far too small. There's no way it ever could have lived."

"I want to see it!"

"But what possible good would come of telling him now?" George asked me. "The damage is already done, and besides, you know how they feel about each other."

"You didn't see it, George," I said. "It had no brain, and its spine..."

"Tell him!"

And so I did.

Shocked and devastated, Vova stormed from the house without saying a word.

"Let him go," George said mildly. "He'll come back once the shock's worn off."

I could think of only one thing: Oedipus gouging his eyes out with the pins from Jocasta's dress. "No, I'm going after him!"

"It won't do any good..."

Oedipus gouging his eyes out with the pins from Jocasta's dress. "I know he's about to do something to hurt himself!"

I found him exactly where I knew I would: hanging by his neck from a branch of the tree bordering the field behind our home. I knew that if his neck wasn't broken, I had mere minutes in which to save him before he suffocated. Running as quickly as my legs could carry me, I somehow made it to the shed, where I found a ladder and a saw. Propping the ladder against the branch from which the young man I loved as a son hung, I climbed until I could reach the rope, which I quickly cut through with the saw. Vova fell to his feet and toppled over, then clumsily stood, rubbing the skin of his neck from where the rope had chafed it. No, his neck wasn't broken, thank God.

"What did you do that for?" he spat angrily at me. "Why didn't you let me die?" His eyes were deep pools of torment. It sent chills down my spine to look into them.

"It's not worth it, Vova," I told him. "Nothing in the world is worth doing that." I reached to embrace him, but he pushed me away roughly.

"I lay with my sister as with my wife..." Tears streamed from his eyes, and every single one was like a tiny dart piercing my soul. I felt as if I'd give the world if I could somehow trade places with him.

"It wasn't your fault," I said. "You didn't know. We should have told you a long time ago, George and I. It's our fault, not yours..."

"I still love her, Mother." The anguish in his eyes cut me to the core. "Even though I know now...that I can never be with her again..." His breath came in ragged gasps. "I can't stop loving her. I can't help it. Will God ever forgive me?"