When Marianne had first arrived in this area at the end of the war, a freshly mounded pile of earth ran alongside this river. As she rode into Momsen with Carsten Kellerman for the first time, she saw men and women scrabbling around on its banks, digging.

What are they doing? she had asked.

Looking for their people, he had answered, his eyes inscrutable.

This was the grave of hundreds of marchers, he explained, the end point for those wretched collections of prisoners driven west from concentration camps. Why? For what reasons were they marched? At that point, the war was as good as over. Everyone knew. But still the SS had marched those prisoners until they dropped from exhaustion and then shot them when they fell. So the dead had lain here until the townspeople buried them, under this pile of earth. And after capitulation, some small number of brothers and fathers and friends and cousins returned to look for their loved ones. Marianne would never forget that.

But the townspeople went about their business as if it had never happened. They fished and washed in the river and walked alongside it in the evenings. No one spoke of the prisoners they had watched stumble and die along its banks. No one erected a marker over their bones.

At Momsen station, Marianne got off. She had steeled herself for the encounter, but now that she was actually here, her hands were cold and clammy and her face felt hot. Better to be quick and done with it. The children would wonder where she was and, left to their own devices, they would certainly forget their studies. Fritz would get into trouble . . . Benita was as good as another child when it came to discipline.

Marianne had intended to confide her plan to Ania, but something had stopped her. Ania had seemed surprised to learn of Benita’s affair, but not shocked. It was clear she did not share Marianne’s moral outrage—and why should she? She had never known Connie. And from what Marianne could discern, her own husband’s life as a resister remained opaque. Ania was deeply silent on the subject. Marianne suspected marital tragedies that went beyond the man’s death. And it was her philosophy not to disturb them—what good was opening a wound that had sealed itself shut? So she let it be, though deep down, she was disappointed by Ania’s indifference. Marriage to Kellerman had put distance between them. But, unlike Franz Muller, Carsten Kellerman was a good man, at least.

In the month since Benita had announced her engagement, a stilted, awkward air had settled over their flat. Marianne and Benita skirted each other and exchanged cool, polite conversation only when necessary. Fortunately, the children were too absorbed in their own activities to notice the chill. Martin and Fritz would soon depart for the boarding school Katarina and Elisabeth attended, and they were busy roaming the hills and fields around Tollingen, enjoying their summer holiday.