She began to compose another letter to Benita, one that sought to offer a more complete apology. But where to begin? Our flat feels empty without you. The flowers on the balcony have shriveled without your care and when I noticed, I soused them and now they look both shriveled and waterlogged, if that is possible. Herr Dressler asks after you every day when I walk past his flat.

I owe you an apology, she wrote, and crossed it out.

I was wrong to intervene in your plans to marry and I am sorry, she wrote instead. If you would like, I will return to Herr Muller and apologize myself. I did what I thought was right, at the expense of your happiness. I see now that it was not my place. This did not sound right either. Too implicitly scolding. Too righteous.

The truth was that Marianne had misunderstood their relationship. She had imagined Benita’s affair with Franz to be a mere diversion, a flight of fancy. She had not grasped how fundamental it was to Benita’s happiness. If she had known . . . then what? Should she have applauded the choice? An ex-Nazi for a resister’s wife? She could never celebrate this. But she had been wrong to interfere. This was what she needed to convey.

But it was so hard to say both what was true and also what was required! At her desk in the lonely parlor, a thick, doldrumy feeling threatened to descend on Marianne. Through her friendship with Benita, she found herself dragged into the quagmire of complexity. Don’t overcomplicate, she had always advised Albrecht. There is a right and a wrong in every situation, and it is our job to extract it.

She stood abruptly and shook her head, capped the pen and folded the letter. She would finish it later.

A warm breeze blew through the open window. It was an unseasonably warm fall day. The kind of day in which late field poppies bloomed and bees worked frantically to finish their work for the season. Years ago, she would have been preparing for the countess’s party—ordering wine and champagne, cakes and cuts of meat. The thought made her want to climb the hill to Burg Lingenfels. She had not visited the castle in ages, not since they had boarded it up.

It was strange to climb the hill alone, no children running alongside her gathering flowers, throwing stalks of wheat, no Benita trailing behind, stopping every so often to rest. But the sunshine and Herr Kellerman’s new herd of cows grazing on the hill went a long way toward dispelling Marianne’s loneliness. What shall we do with the castle? she asked Albrecht as she walked. Give it to the state, she imagined him saying, his voice unusually clear in her head. His answer was easy to guess: he was too much the aristocrat to suggest selling it. The very thought made her laugh. Albrecht von Lingenfels, intellectual, revolutionary, hero, yes . . . but a terrible businessman.