A fateful shot in the corridors of Smolny—sounded once long ago—still echoes after decades. For the country, it’s just a line in a textbook, but for Irina it’s a personal mission and a risky intellectual game. Why did the guard задержался only a few seconds? Who was Nikolayev—the deluded fanatic or a compliant executor of the “people from the shadows”?
While Irina searches for clues on faded pages of old books, her loved ones face problems of today. Sometimes a chance meeting in a library overturns fate and forces her to make a difficult decision.