Ursula laughed softly. “Ah, Theo, you are a dear boy, but you are gullible if you believe the leopard changes his spots.” She moved a couple of rings into a box. “I grew up in the Stasi. My father was a senior officer. Klaus followed in his footsteps. My mother drank herself to death, and now I follow in her footsteps. These paths are set for us when we are young. I often think, if only your mother had taken you and your sister away and started a new life. How different everything would have been.”

“My mother got out,” I said. “But she left Juliet and me behind.”

“No one gets out, Theo. At least not alive.”

Ursula loved to make dramatic pronouncements, and it felt like the wrong time to mention that my mother had flown to Guam for a divorce. It had been uncontested by my father because she allowed him to have full custody of Juliet and me. My mother had saved herself, but not her children.

She stared into the mirror. “I am full of hidden horrors.”

I shuddered in recognition when she said it. “I’ve heard that before.”

“It’s a line from Medea.”

“But why would you . . . ?”

“It was a line from a play your mother was in. She kept repeating it.” She picked up the glass in front of her, only to discover it was empty.

“I don’t understand.”

“He loved her—I can tell you that. As much as he is capable of loving anyone, which is not much in the greater scheme of things. But he wanted to control her, so he lied and played games with her mind. I am ashamed of my part in it. I was in the house to help with the kinder, and instead I slept with their father. No wonder Juliet hates me.” Ursula got up from the vanity slowly, with the painful self-awareness of the inebriated. “Of course, he did exactly the same things to me that he did to her. I started losing parts of myself until I didn’t even know who I was anymore.”

She moved toward me unsteadily.

“Now you understand,” she added. “Why I wanted to help Caroline escape. She needed a different life. She and Teddy both did.”

What I understood was that Ursula had to be very drunk, and she didn’t make any sense. “What does that mean, Ursula?”

“I tried to get away from your father, and I failed. This life is what I deserve. Your father is my penance. But Caroline never did the things I did. She didn’t deserve this. She wanted me to help her, but I can’t do what she wanted me to do.”

“Which was what?”