“Tell me Anneke knew that. If I could just believe she knew that…”

“I’m absolutely certain she knew it,” Gini said quietly. “Mrs. van der Leyden, I’m sure she knew…”

It was an inadequate reply, but it seemed to console Anneke’s mother—temporarily, at least.

“Perhaps you’re right,” she said. “I pray to God you’re right.”

Leaving the house, Gini walked away fast, and stood by the canal, holding tight against the railings of the bridge. She was trembling with the force of Erica van der Leyden’s emotion. It had passed from Anneke’s mother into her; she felt as if it were in her lungs and heart and blood. It was fearsome, and she feared it most because it had not simply been transferred from Anneke’s mother to herself—something within her had risen up to meet it, to recognize it. I have been claimed, Gini thought, beginning to pace the bridge, breathing in great gusts of the cold air; and because she knew that this had always lain in wait for her, that it was her female birthright, this moment was one she never forgot.

She crossed to the far side of the canal and looked back. Anneke’s mother was drawing the blinds against the gathering dusk. Gini knew she had crossed a divide. For a moment she felt physically weak, weighted down by a disabling passion and concern. The next instant she experienced its very opposite, a heady strength so powerful, so affirmative, she felt light with joy.

She had been ready for this initiation into womanhood, she thought. She had been preparing for it since arriving in Sarajevo, but how curious, how unlikely, that this revelation should be effected in a strange city, in the bourgeois hall of a bourgeois house, by a woman she had never previously met.

This was how it felt to be a mother; this was the nature of that condition; she could feel its vulnerability and its power flow in her veins. She felt a sudden and overwhelming flood of gratitude to the woman who, having lost a child, had given her this gift.

Was the conduit grief, or love? Both, she thought, and, turning, quickening her pace, made her way toward the Leidseplein, and its cafés and its lights.

In the summer months the Rembrandt café would have been filled, no doubt, with students, backpackers, the international army of the young. Now, in January, its interior was almost deserted. Those few customers there were all foreign and elderly, perhaps retired couples taking low-price mid-winter breaks.

Gini chose a prominent table by the windows and ordered coffee. She waited, calming herself, forcing her mind back to her work, though she knew from this moment on, she worked with new purpose and a deeper determination, and that her work would be informed by the emotion she had seen in Erica van der Leyden’s face. Two young girls had died; Mina Landis would not make a third, she would not let that happen—and as she let that thought settle in her mind, she felt it was not some empty assertion or boast: she was armed now, and injury to another daughter, another child, was something she could actually prevent.