Overcome by relief at having positive proof that she had survived and was uninjured, Max laughingly unwound her arms from around his neck.

‘You look amazing, Ilse,’ he said truthfully. ‘Are you sure you’ve really just been through a war?’

‘Oh, I’ve been through a war all right.’ As they walked with arms around each other’s waists into the house in which she and her mother and Lotti and Hester had their little apartment, her face and voice were suddenly sombre. ‘And horrific as all of it has been, the last few weeks of it were the worst.’

‘I know.’ He looked at her in deep concern, wondering if she wanted to talk about it; wondering if it would be a healing process if she did so.

She read in his eyes what he was thinking. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Not now. There’s another nightmare that was far, far worse than anything that was done to me by revenge-seeking Ivans.’

‘You mean Nicholas’s execution?’

She stood still for a moment outside the door of the apartment, her eyes holding his. ‘You know?’

He nodded. ‘I’m an intelligence officer, Ilse. I knew practically the instant it happened.’

She opened the door. ‘I don’t know where my mother is,’ she said, leading the way into a minuscule sitting room. ‘Lotti is working for the Americans and won’t be home for another couple of hours and Hester spends all day, every day, trying to find news of Claus.’

‘It’s you I wanted to see,’ he said, not wanting to talk about Claus yet, knowing that what Hester had so far failed to do, he would be able to do with comparative ease. ‘Before I’m reunited with Lotti, there’s something I want to tell you.’

They sat down together on a sofa, hands clasped.

‘I know what you’re going to say,’ she said, her voice soft and low. ‘I know you love Lotti. I once saw the two of you having dinner together on the terrace of a restaurant overlooking the lake at Wannsee and the way you were looking at each other left me in no doubt of it. It was then I decided to marry Nicholas. Not because I didn’t love you. I did.’

Her bluebell-blue eyes held his. ‘I still do. When, after I married Nicholas, nothing happened between you and Lotti, I thought perhaps I’d made a mistake—and that I may have made a mistake about other things. And then, after Nicholas was executed…’

Her voice shook. ‘After Nicholas was executed I thought that perhaps when the war was over…when the world was a sane place again…that we might…that what we’d once had we could have again. But you’ve come to tell me that we can’t, haven’t you?’

‘Yes,’ he said gently. ‘What we had will always be very precious to me, Ilse, but what I have with Lotti is something else entirely. It’s something you had with Nicholas, even though it was something that only grew after you were married, and it’s something you will one day have with someone else.’