And maybe she was right, who knows. Elfriede remembers little of the next couple of years in this loony bin that—true to its name—actually made you loonier each day you lived there, smack in the rainiest possible corner of the rainiest possible country, who the hell thought of that? Some crazy person. It was not until Johann arrived after the war and dragged the secret out of poor Mrs. Thorpe, who made him promise not to tell the little ones in exchange for allowing him to take charge of Elfriede, take charge of his beloved mother, bring her to Switzerland and care for her devotedly until, bit by bit, she discovered enough of herself to survive. By that time, years later, what could you possibly do? Announce yourself back in your children’s lives? They would hate her, she was sure. She and Johann argued fiercely over this point, right up until Johann abandoned his post in the German high command and fled to the United States in 1938. She couldn’t do it. She was brave enough to live, brave enough even to take over the clinic, run it herself to give refuge for those who were uprooted and unwanted, but she was not brave enough to introduce herself to these children she had failed. She was not brave enough to summon up that fierce, passionate love once again, because why should these children want this love of hers thrust upon them? It poisoned whatever it touched. No, she kept her love locked tight in her heart, where it could do no one any harm.

Until Johann cabled her four months ago with the news about Benedict. Then she understood what she was meant to do. What she had been waiting the past twenty years to do. What Wilfred needed her to do. So she had done it. This impossible thing, to rescue a man from Colditz prison, she had done, employing Johann’s old ties and her own ingenuity. She had bartered him out of prison—oh, the first sight of her youngest son, her baby, fevered and weak and limping, unfocused blue eyes and matted hair of indeterminate color, how it wrecked her—and then carefully maneuvered him south by train and horse cart, an injured German soldier on his way to a Swiss cure, according to the perfectly faked papers Elfriede had obtained in Zurich from a man who had found refuge in her clinic a year earlier. She had nursed him and fed him and healed him. She had saved her son, Wilfred’s son, their son, with the strength and singlemindedness of her love. So there.

And now here he goes, this lost-found son of hers, her personal redemption, her gift to Wilfred, staggering down the path, cane plunging, hair glittering in the late sunshine, and she thinks, Damn it all, Wilfred, could you have made him just a little less like yourself, please?