But then. Thirty or so yards from the old wooden door, something funny happens. The script changes without any warning at all. The door swings open, and a woman comes tumbling out, pale blond, blue eyes so well remembered that Elfriede stops dead. The woman’s gaze slides right past Benedict, who has also turned to stone, and finds her, Elfriede. They recognize each other at the same time. As if this courtyard is a bedroom in Florida, a picnic blanket, an ice cream parlor, and the decades have compressed into nothing. As if the air smells of salt instead of spring.

Mutti! Ursula gasps.

So Elfriede misses the moment when her son reunites with the woman who lumbers along behind Ursula. She’s on her knees, holding Ursula to her chest, and doesn’t see the brunette with the enormous belly, crying and crying, sinking on the stones beside her, wrapped around Benedict who is wrapped around her. That meeting will have to wait until she wakes from this dream she’s having.

Somewhere in the middle of the dream, though, Elfriede happens to squint upward—maybe by chance, maybe by human instinct, maybe by the nudge of some unseen hand—to discover a third woman, who stands near the door, arms folded. The sun beats down on her brown hair. A cigarette dangles from one hand, and she’s smiling a little.

Her other hand wipes at her eyes with a small, square linen cloth.

Epilogue
Lulu

June 1951

(RMS Queen Mary, At Sea)

I haven’t given much thought to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor over the course of the past seven years. Like you, I’ve seen their names in the newspapers from time to time, some dateline from Biarritz or Paris or New York—never Nassau, of course, and certainly not London—but the stories are of so little interest to me, so little relevance to my own life, this party or that party, this magnificent necklace or that extraordinary bracelet, I generally don’t linger. I simply don’t give a damn.

And I’m chasing the twins down the promenade deck when the luggage comes aboard, twenty-eight steamer trunks in all, and the demi-royal couple emerges from the back of a chauffeured limousine to the crump of a hundred flashbulbs and the cheering of a gullible crowd of admirers. All that fuss occurs at a distance, scarcely noticed, because Maggie’s about to throw her left shoe down a ventilation shaft, so I learn the news hours later, as we’re dressing for dinner. The ship’s already well past the tip of Long Island, steaming out to the open ocean. My husband straightens his tie, eyes me in the mirror, and speaks in a voice of forced cheer. “I say. Jolly coincidence. Have you heard the Windsors are aboard?”