Ania had been forced to involve her boys in their father’s return. Ever dutiful, but simmering with resentment, they had half walked, half carried Rainer up the hill from the Kellerman farm. Wolfgang had arranged a straw pallet in the castle’s kitchen, along with a supply of water to drink. Anselm brought him a plate of food every night—he barely ate. Presumably, while she lay here giving birth to this new baby, her boys tended to their father—locked in some weird reversal with the man who had never cared for them.

Ania’s contractions sped forward until the pain was as constant as her heartbeat—rhythmic and all consuming, it obliterated worry. She was almost grateful. Rainer would be discovered or not. Her boys would tend to him or leave him for the ravens. Their life would explode or continue on the trajectory she had wrestled it onto. There was nothing she could do.

The baby came fast. In thirty violent minutes Ania pushed her out. Even four weeks early, she was as plump and smooth faced as an Eskimo. With her round dark eyes, she regarded the world impassively and then fell asleep. This was, apparently, what a child of Carsten’s was like. Or maybe this was simply a baby of peacetime: satisfied, round cheeked, and enigmatic. Swaddled in U.S. Army–issue blankets, she seemed to belong to some promising international future rather than a defeated Germany.

Ania handed her to the nurse and attempted to rise to her feet.

“No, no,” the nurse protested in alarm. “Rest now, because you’ll need your strength when you go home.” What did she know?

The nurses plied her with glasses of lukewarm water and sleeping pills. Carsten would not return for her until morning anyway.

Ania did not want to see the baby. So she took the pills they offered and drifted in and out of a thick, dreamless sleep, waking now and then to stare through the window at the courtyard, the bleached white paths across the grass like a crisscross of bones.

The next morning, she woke to find Benita sitting at the foot of her bed.

It took Ania a moment to remember where she was.

“Benita,” she managed to say. “Did you come to see me?” The idea seemed incredible. She had not seen Benita for so long—possibly not since the wedding.

“Why else? I went to the farm yesterday and heard the news.”

Benita did not look well. Ania could see this. She did not have her usual rosy cheeks and neatly arranged hair. She was wearing a shabby brown cardigan. And there were dark circles under her eyes.

“Is everything all right?” Ania began, but a nurse appeared, holding the baby. Her baby. The idea was still unaccustomed. Ania regarded the swaddled creature and felt nothing.

“There she is!” Benita exclaimed. For a moment, enthusiasm restored her beauty. She was the sort of woman who lit up in the presence of an infant. Her love of Martin had always made Ania feel sorry for her own sons, both loved so much less lavishly.