Varya had always told herself that she did her research out of love—love for life, for science, and for her siblings, who hadn’t lived long enough to reach old age—but at heart, she worried that her primary motivation was fear. Fear that she had no control, that life slipped through one’s fingers no matter what. Fear that Simon and Klara and Daniel had, at least, lived in the world, while Varya lived in her research, in her books, in her head.
