She turned to her torturers, about to speak, and then realized the insanity of what she was about to do. Max was far too clever to simply put himself in her place. The man in Munich would be non-existent, and by the time the Gestapo discovered he was non-existent she would be somewhere safe. Max would see to that. Somehow he had engineered her release out of this hellhole and he would never allow her to be brought back to it.

The night sky was tinged with grey when she stepped out of the vast building and into Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. On legs threatening to give way beneath her she began walking, struggling to decide where she should go. Her apartment in Lützowstrasse was no longer safe. She couldn’t risk rearrest. Nicholas and Ilse’s apartment, then? Or her parents’ apartment in Charlottenburg?

The pain from her mangled, broken, tortured hand was indescribable. She needed painkillers. A doctor. A hospital. She needed Max.

As she approached the corner with Saarlandstrasse, a two-seater black Steyr zoomed to a halt a few yards away. The car was Nicholas’s, but the driver was Max.

Her joy and relief as Max vaulted from the car were so intense she reeled against the building she had been walking past, sagging against it, nursing her mutilated hand, tears flooding down her cheeks.

He sprinted towards her and, knowing he was about to seize her in a bear hug, she cried out urgently: ‘No! My hand, Max! Please be careful of my hand!’

He stopped abruptly only inches away from her. The expression in his eyes, as he looked at what they had done to her, was one she knew she would never forget.

‘Let me help you to the car,’ he said thickly. ‘I’m taking you to the hospital. To the Charité.’

Unable to hold her to him he gently tilted her face to his. ‘Before we go, there’s something I have to tell you. Something I should have told you long ago.’

She flinched, certain he was about to tell her he was going to marry his Munich girlfriend; that he had, perhaps, already married her.

‘I love you, Lotti,’ he said sombrely. ‘I’ve always loved you and I’ve been too blind to know it.’

As she looked at him uncomprehendingly, he realized she thought he was speaking of family love, the kind of love he felt for all his cousins.

‘I’m in love with you, Monkeyface.’ His voice was thick with an emotion he’d never felt before, and beneath the thick tumble of his curly hair his eyes blazed the truth of what he was telling her. ‘Will you forgive me for being such a fool as not to have realized it before? Will you try to feel differently about me? To love me in the same way I so desperately love you?’

Lotti made a sound that sounded like a sob. ‘I won’t have to try,’ she said, wondering how anyone in such pain could be so happy. ‘I’ve loved you, the way you now love me, ever since I was fourteen or fifteen. You’re the only person I’ve ever loved. The only person I ever will love.’