Jürgen and I stared at one another, connecting the dots in the only way that made any sense.

“They knew you’d be calling,” Jürgen said finally.

“You were friends with Karl and I was friends with Lydia long before you and I even started dating,” I said. “If we can’t trust them, who can we trust?”

The answer was in my husband’s eyes. Moving forward, we would have to trust no one outside of our family.

“What do we do about Mayim?” he asked.

I could never bring myself to send Mayim away, but she couldn’t stay. We couldn’t allow our children to be brainwashed, but we had no choice other than to allow our children to be brainwashed.

I couldn’t join my thoughts together in a way that made sense.

“My love,” Jürgen said suddenly. I turned to him, and he gave me a gentle smile. The skin around his swollen eye crinkled. “Leave it with me, will you? Let me think on it.”

He went inside to take a nap after that. Mayim retreated to Adele’s house with Laura, and I went next door to join them. Adele made me sickly sweet, milky tea, and every time I finished a cup, she refilled it. In the end, we sat in near silence, but for the sound of Laura’s chatter as she pottered around. I nursed that final cup of tea in my hands, too full to drink it but drawing comfort from the warmth.

When Jürgen woke he joined us, and he insisted I go home for a nap too. And when I roused again, I slipped out of the bedroom and into the living room, where I found Jürgen and Mayim sitting across from one another on the sofas. Mayim was crying, dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief.

“I had already decided to leave, Sofie,” she said.

“But how will you survive?” I asked, stricken.

“I’m strong. My family is strong,” she said, her voice breaking. “Besides, we don’t have a choice. You know that’s true, even if you wish it wasn’t.”

In the foyer less than an hour later, I stood opposite my best friend, staring into her eyes.

“I’m going to be okay,” Mayim insisted. But she was pale, and I knew that she did not believe that any more than I did. I had been increasingly aware that she and her family were in danger. Until that moment in the foyer, I fooled myself that as long as she was in our house, she was safe.

But I had become someone who would sit at a dinner party and crack jokes about pork knuckle when a man spoke of Mayim and her family as vermin. I was someone who would let my child read anti-Semitic books.