I realized with dismay that this was why I woke Calvin up. I was upset, and Calvin always knew how to fix things. Even in that moment, when the uneven emotions between us had never been more evident, Calvin did not miss a beat in his care and attention.

“I’m fine,” I said, and I slid off his bed, suddenly desperate to get out of the room. “I’m sorry for—I didn’t mean to wake you. I just wasn’t thinking straight.”

That night, I realized for the very first time that I was torturing Calvin. Yes, he had me living in his house and in his life, and yes, we were the best of friends—but I was ever so slightly out of reach anyway, and even after all of those years, he continued to hope for what could never be.

39

Sofie

Wewelsburg, Germany
December 1944

It was supposed to be the most important evening in Jürgen’s career, but the work never stopped. Lydia and I spent a leisurely afternoon pampering ourselves, while Karl and Jürgen threw their tuxedos on and disappeared for meetings in some corner of the vast Castle Varlar. I hadn’t seen him since, but I wasn’t anxious. This event couldn’t start without Jürgen, the guest of honor.

Lydia was by my side as I paused in the doorway to the dining hall, taking in the opulent scene. Most of those in the room were men in SS uniforms or tuxedos. Only a handful of women were permitted to attend.

Lydia was wearing yet another dirndl-style dress—a more formal version with puffed sleeves and elaborate embroidery on the skirt. I was wearing the finest outfit I’d ever owned—finer than my wedding dress. A designer at the Deutsches Modeamt fashioned the suit in cream silk, elevated by thousands of tiny pearls and crystal beads.

I was pretending to be excited, but I felt nothing more than a sense of simmering anxiety. I was always anxious around senior Nazis.

I’d been particularly concerned for Jürgen since the rocket program moved to the site they called Mittelwerk in the wake of a British bombing raid on Peenemünde, in the summer of 1943. The move had been unimaginably complex—the entire rocketry operation shifted more than six hundred kilometers across Germany into the tunnels of a supposedly air raid–proof gypsum mine, beneath a huge hill called the Kohnstein. Jürgen and Karl and their staff were tasked with reconstructing the research program and establishing a factory to mass-produce the rockets in those mines, and they were given just a few short months to do it.