I had just discovered I was pregnant again, but my feelings even about that were muddled. With my first two pregnancies, I told Jürgen and then Mayim before anyone else—even Adele. I was reluctant to break the tradition, even though I knew it was inevitable that I’d have to.

I even felt conflicted about bringing another child into this world. Every day, Georg and Laura were slipping a little further from me, even though we were all still under one roof. The same would happen with this baby, unless something drastic changed before he or she was old enough to start school.

But Jürgen was right—there had to be something positive to focus on so that I could get through each day.

“The children,” I whispered back. “And you. And Aunt Adele.”

“I remember when you two didn’t get along.”

“These days,” I confessed, “I don’t know what I’d do without her.”

Georg’s birthday loomed, and all he wanted to do was to have a party with Hans. I gently tried to suggest other children, but Georg and Hans had the kind of friendship I’d shared with Mayim, so I couldn’t bring myself to refuse the request.

We invited Adele to the picnic, but when she heard that the zu Schiller family would be there, her hip was suddenly too sore. Instead, she came to have breakfast with us beforehand. We had fat ham steaks and eggs, and she brought a photo of Jürgen from his first birthday in her house.

“He looked just like you do now,” she told Georg, showing him the faded black-and-white image. “See?”

“We could be twins, Papa,” Georg said, holding the photo beside his face. There was a strong likeness there, even if Georg had inherited a darker shade of blue eyes from me. Jürgen and Georg grinned at one another, then dissolved into mirroring one another’s silly faces. Laura sighed impatiently at their antics.

“She’s becoming such a serious child. Just as I recall you were,” Adele said wryly, glancing at me.

“I was terrified of you. I remember talking to May—” I stopped myself just in time, drew in a breath to collect myself, then continued as smoothly as I could. “—to my friends about cranky Mrs. Rheinberg, who lived next door to our city house.”

When I was a child, Adele and Jürgen were the slightly odd pair in the house next door to my family’s city house. Then one day I visited our Lichterfelde West house, and that lanky, bespectacled boy next door suddenly seemed irresistible. Later, he admitted he’d been trying to connect with me for years, and he found himself struck mute every time we made eye contact.