“Your dad asked me to do this. Gave me permission. Even told me how to get inside.”

Piet Hoffmann waved for everyone to follow him into the closet. Then he pressed the hidden lever and opened the secret room. A room he knew Hugo and Rasmus had visited once. They never talked about it, but a gun lying in the wrong direction had given them away. Zofia, on the other hand, looked as surprised and duped as she probably felt. But he gave her no time to ask. She could do that later. After they were through the next hidden door. The one that even Hugo and Rasmus didn’t know about. Because behind the weapons cabinet, which he now lifted off the wall, there stood a small white button. If he pushed it, part of the wall opened up. Inwards. Another hidden door. High and wide enough for an adult to easily enter a tunnel, which led under the backyard all the way to the toolshed—the same path he’d just used to enter.

•   •   •

They snuck through the darkness. Past the fruit trees and raspberry bushes. He glanced at Zofia, who was staring straight ahead. He wanted to explain to her that it was long ago, when they’d just bought this house and she was still living in a tiny apartment in the city while he did the renovations, and he was another person back then, living in a parallel reality. The one she’d made him leave. But that time was still always there, maybe in documents that threatened his family, maybe in a secret tunnel that ended up being his family’s escape route.

They approached the car, parked in another section of their sleeping suburb, loaded the backpacks he and Zofia had hurriedly packed. As he asked Hugo and Rasmus to climb into the back seat of an unfamiliar vehicle with a stranger in the driver’s seat, he had to bite his own cheek as hard as he could to keep from hugging them. When Zofia sank down beside him with Luiza on her lap, biting was no longer enough and he had to turn talk radio up loud to cover his mumbled “it’s me—Dad.” They sat in silence for the whole of their short trip to the ground-floor apartment at Number 37, which none of his passengers had ever seen before.

Silent until Hugo just couldn’t take it anymore.

“Who are you?”

Hoffmann adjusted the rearview mirror to get a good look at his son.

“A friend. Of your . . . father’s.”

“If you’re his friend, how come we’ve never met you?”

“You have.”

Hugo peeked at his mother sitting in front of him, and she nodded, as if to confirm the stranger was speaking the truth.

“When?”

Hoffmann twisted the rearview mirror, looking at his wise and thoughtful son.

“When . . . what?”

“When did we meet?”

“It was . . . The first time was long ago. You were little.”