My room had a knotted-pine floor, moody black-and-white portraits, and stark black furnishings with crisp white linens. First thing, I took a long, hot shower. Afterward, I caught sight of myself in the bathroom’s mirrored walls. I stared at my largest scar. It was strangely compelling, this red welt that ran from the hollow of my throat straight down to my navel. As a student in Berlin, I’d gotten a tattoo—three lines of text penned by Christopher Marlowe, divided by that sinister red line:

Hell hath no limits / nor is circumscribed

In one self place / for where we are is hell,

And where hell is / must we ever be.

I had other scars on my body, jagged gashes on my torso from the animal attack. Ironically, the long, straight scar was what had saved my life—it was the surgical scar from when doctors had operated on me. Away at boarding school in England, I had been part of a group of boys who dared each other to do frightening things, cutting deep into skin or exposing flesh to flame. There was bluster in it, a determination to broadcast how tough we were. Only the pain, for me, meant something more. It tamed the dark side of my brain, the one that whispered, I am full of hidden horrors, the beastly demigod demanding a sacrifice. Even in that disturbed band of miscreants, I stood out. Everyone was fascinated by the scar that bisected me as if I were a lab specimen. It was a comment on the powers of childhood imagination that when I told other boys an Aztec cult had tried to sacrifice me to a tiger, this seemed like a reasonable explanation.

Dressing quickly, I pushed the scar out of my mind. I’d given myself two days to revisit the past. I was all too aware that my leaving New York—and my son—would only provide fodder for my sister’s case against me. For the briefest of moments, it occurred to me that Dr. Haven could be setting me up. After all, she had encouraged me to leave New York, which was a boon to Juliet’s plotting. Stop being paranoid, I warned myself. But paranoia was my only defense against my family.

I took the U-Bahn south to the Brandenburg Gate, as if I were a normal tourist. As a student, I’d only seen it at night, when the eighteenth-century colonnade was wrapped in golden lights. During the day, I found myself staring at the very top, with the four-horse chariot driven by the goddess of victory. I’d spent eighteen months in Berlin, and I’d never managed to visit the Reichstag, a block to the north, nor the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a block to the south. I had, however, spent a decent amount of time in the Tiergarten, Berlin’s answer to Central Park.