She felt all the fears, all her terrifying images of what might have happened to him and the nightmare of thinking he might even be dead, dissolve in that instant. She felt light suddenly.

“Klaus! My God…” Barbara rushed to him.

She ran to Klaus and embraced him, pulling him hard into her. “Klaus … I was so afraid that you were … you were…” She kissed his neck, his mouth, her fingers snared in his golden hair.

And she realized that his arms weren’t holding her in return, that she might as well have been kissing a stranger. “Klaus?”

He looked down at her, his single eye focusing slowly. His black eye patch was gone—he wore a makeshift white one with an elastic string tangled in his hair. A hint of a smile touched his lips, then vanished. He opened his mouth, but what emerged was a sob. He choked it back with an effort, his throat moving, and his hand reached out to touch her cheek. She clasped it, holding it there. “So awful,” he said. His voice was cracked and rough, as if he’d spent days shouting and roaring in the madness that had taken him. “Barbara, what I did … Es war schrecklich,” he finished in German: it was terrible.

“It wasn’t your fault,” she told him. “You know that.”

He shook his head mutely. His gaze searched hers, and she saw the moisture gathered in his eye. “I was right,” he said. “You needed to be in New York. You put together the team that saved us. You did what I couldn’t do.”

She shook her head as she hugged him again. She didn’t want to talk about it, didn’t care. “Klaus, I never knew what it was like for you, not really. I didn’t listen to you closely enough, didn’t hear what you were trying to tell me underneath all the words, and I’m sorry for that.” She took a step back from him, still holding his hands. “From now on,” Barbara said, “we will keep nothing from each other. We’ll be the team we were meant to be. We’ll tell each other what we’re feeling, what we’re thinking. There will be no secrets between us. Promise me that.”

Klaus’s hands shook. She tightened her grip. He shook his head. “No,” he said, his voice dead and empty, his face slack. When his gaze finally came back to her, there was no affection there, only pain. “No,” he repeated. “I can’t make that promise, Barbara. There are things that I will never tell you. There are things that must always remain hidden.”

She nodded, not wanting to agree but knowing that she had no choice. Not now. “Then we should talk about the Committee, what we need to do going forward from this, what we need to do to recover.”