“Truthfully, Sofie, it would be a relief,” he admitted, staring down into his wine. His shoulders were stiff, his expression taut. In the time that passed since he took that “miracle” job, my husband had aged. There were fine lines around his eyes and bags beneath them.

“Has it not been going well?”

“Hitler is rebuilding the German military. It will be public knowledge soon.” I gasped in shock. “Otto says that Hitler expects the world will sit idly by, and then the remilitarization will snowball. The rocket program has made incredible gains, but that only means that if they asked us to weaponize the technology, we could do so in just a few years. I’ve been trying to figure out how to extract myself for some time, but it’s not going to be easy,” he admitted, dropping his voice to a whisper. “They need me too much. They’ll never let me walk away. We’d have to do this quickly and quietly. If you’re serious about this—”

“I am,” I blurted.

Our eyes locked over the wine. He nodded.

“Saturday. We’ll pick a border, find the back roads, and pretend we’re just going for a drive.”

“This Saturday?”

“If we’re doing this, we need to do it right away.”

“Okay,” I breathed, my heart rate accelerating.

“Talk to Mayim tomorrow. I’ll talk to Adele. Other than that, we cannot breathe a word of it.”

23

Lizzie

Huntsville, Alabama
1950

Calvin was leaning against the kitchen door, looking up at the ceiling, as if he were praying for patience. This conversation was one I could not afford for my brother to overhear, so I waited until Henry was in bed before I confronted Calvin about Gail’s suspicions.

“So? Is it true?” I asked. “Was Jürgen Rhodes in the SS?”

“Lizzie, sweetheart, you know I can’t talk to you about this,” Cal said, but he avoided my eyes as he spoke.

“My God,” I whispered, my mouth going dry. “He lives on Sauerkraut Hill with the rest of them, doesn’t he? There’s an SS officer living two blocks away from us? Free in our community?”

“Even I don’t know for sure,” Calvin said flatly. “But yes, when Newsome admitted he’d seen evidence a senior scientist was in the SS, it was Jürgen he was referring to.”

“This is an outrage!”

“Lizzie. Don’t fly off the handle.”

“Even you said in the beginning that it wasn’t right—”

“I should never have said anything to you about any of this! It just never occurred to me that we’d end up living in the same community as these men,” Calvin said.

“Because you knew it was dangerous!”

“I was nervous in the beginning, yes. But when it comes to Jürgen, I’m certain that the good he can do for this country far outweighs any risk he might have posed.”