By the time she goes to bed, it’s almost two o’clock in the morning, but everything’s packed and ready. She’s informed Helga of her decision, and Helga for once was rendered speechless. Oh my, the look on Helga’s face! Elfriede reaches for the pillow next to her, the one on which Wilfred’s head used to lie, on which she used to gaze at him rapturously while he slept like a dead man, and she tucks it into her arms. For some time, she lies awake, too dazzled to sleep, certain she’s incapable of any slumber this night, until she’s waking up to a bright Florida morning, sunshine irradiating the windows, Johann jumping on her bed and pulling at her shoulders.

“Wake up, Mama! Wake up!”

Elfriede sits up on her elbows and tries to make sense of the world. “Johann! Darling. What time is it?”

But Johann doesn’t know the time. What child ever does? His eyes are round and blue and stricken. He tugs her arm almost out of its socket.

“My sisters!” he says. “Where are my sisters?”

In the years that follow, Elfriede will recall, most of all, the emptiness of the house during that terrible day. The absence of things, the dusty absence of life, which she remembers as an absence of light itself, even though the official weather records indicate that the sun shone as brightly as ever, from dawn until dusk.

Helga’s happy to explain the whole affair. The previous evening, while Elfriede bathed the children, she offered Charlotte ten thousand marks to depart the next morning with her daughters, never to return to Germany, never to make any further claim on the family, never to attempt to contact the family again. After a short period of consideration, Charlotte counteroffered at twenty thousand marks, and Helga accepted. She wrote out the cheque right there in the parlor, and Charlotte had just tucked this valuable scrap of paper into her pocket when Elfriede arrived downstairs with Gertrud. Helga relates all this while sipping her coffee, nibbling her toast. Elfriede’s too stunned and enraged to speak, let alone eat. She leaves without a word, walks three miles to the train station with a bewildered Johann in tow, but the ticket master came on duty at ten o’clock, he doesn’t know anything about a party of four, a woman and three small girls, who might have departed on some train at dawn or thereabouts. Elfriede, not to be denied, insists he check the receipts, the ticket log left behind by his predecessor. He tells her he’s awfully sorry, but he can’t do that, confidentiality or something.