Now Benita began to cry in earnest. Her shoulders shook, and ugly, sputtering sobs escaped from her throat.

“Do what you want.” Marianne sighed. “But I won’t let you draw Martin into this.”

At this, Benita looked up. She reached into her pocket for a handkerchief and blew her nose.

“Think it through,” Marianne said, softening slightly. “It is easy to mistake—”

Benita interrupted. “You are cruel, Marianne. Connie always said so, but I never saw it.” She looked directly at her. “But now I can see it.”

All day, Marianne felt the words like an ache. When would Connie have said this? It was a betrayal. Tough, she could imagine him saying. Discerning. Even hard. But not cruel. It was an arrow to her heart.

“Katarina,” she asked when the girl came to say good night, “do you think of me as cruel?”

Katarina’s dark eyes blinked in surprise. It was not like her mother to ask such a thing. “Cruel?” she repeated. The word shocked her: she was a true von Lingenfels. “Of course not! Why do you ask?”

Marianne sighed. “Maybe we are all cruel sometimes without intending to be.”

“Not you,” Katarina said, with such earnestness it made Marianne smile.

“Even me.” Marianne put an arm around her daughter and rested her cheek against the girl’s side. Despite everything, she was still only a child.

Marianne longed for the reassuring voice of an adult. She would ask Ania when she saw her next.

CHAPTER TWENTY

EHRENHEIM, JUNE 1950

Ania received another letter the following Saturday. This time it was not delivered by the mailman but by Frau Metzger, the woman who brought their cheese.

“From a man,” Frau Metzger said with a coquettish smile, pulling the crinkly envelope from her bag. “He came to the market last week.”

Ania stared.

“Well?” Frau Metzger grinned. “Aren’t you going to open it? . . . Or maybe you already know who it was.” The woman winked.

“Of course not,” Ania said.

“Ah.” Frau Metzger sighed, obviously disappointed. “He did not look well. Recently back from the east.”

“Hmm.” Ania frowned in an approximation of confusion. “Thank you very much.”

This time there was no return address.

I forgive you. You did what you felt was best. But you are not finished with me yet.

The letter, if it could be called that, was wrapped around a photograph. A young man and woman wearing formal clothing, standing side by side at the bottom of an imposing set of steps. Wind blew at their hair and lifted the woman’s skirt. The man gazed off to the side as the woman smiled bravely in a manner that was as openly uncertain as it was direct.

And Ania was there, with the wind blowing in her ears and her best shoes pinching her toes and a sense of great import leading her, irrationally, toward giddiness. She was like a person jumping from an airplane, experiencing the lightness of commitment to an unchangeable path. It was like remembering a character from one of the novels she had read in her youth.