He was tall, certainly taller than Joy’s neighbours and the Georgians she’d come to know in her time of living in Dighomi, an upscale residential community in Tbilisi, the Georgian capital. He was young and thin and blonde and well dressed – as if headed to the theatre, or perhaps a wedding.

Minutes earlier on October 7, 2021, Joy, an American nurse and the wife of a US embassy official, had been taking her laundry out of the dryer when she was completely consumed by an acute ringing sound that reminded her of what someone in the movies experiences after a bomb has gone off.