“You remember it?” Marianne was saying, lifting Martin down from the wagon—sweet Martin, Benita’s precious boy, love of her life, the child she had thought she would never see again.

She nodded and tried to climb out of the cart.

“Let me help,” Marianne said. “You are exhausted.”

Benita willed herself to step over the side and drop to the ground. She would walk with her son. But Martin was already ahead of her, following Marianne’s eight-year-old boy, Fritz.

“What a healthy child. That is a blessing,” Marianne said, taking Benita’s elbow.

And despite the many years since Benita had seen her, despite the fact that she had never even known Marianne, really, that she had—if anything—been irritated by the older woman’s surety and quick tongue, she allowed herself to be guided.

When Benita woke the next morning, the sun was rising, pink behind the black outline of the chestnut tree, the stable, the crow perched on the roof. The scene reminded her of the silhouette cutouts she’d cherished as a girl: quaint two-dimensional forms of children frolicking, dirndl-clad maidens dancing, steepled churches rising over sleeping towns. She had always stopped before the artists’ stall in the Saturday market and admired these black-and-white visions of an uncomplicated life.

She rolled over and surveyed her surroundings. The room had once been used as a pantry—the walls were lined with empty shelves and an ancient butter churn sat in the corner. It smelled of damp stone and, faintly, of pickling vinegar and Christmas spices. Old smells, baked into the walls.

Martin lay curled beside her on the thin mattress, his blond hair spread fanlike on the pillow, his sweet, perfectly formed features made fragile by sleep. He was such a handsome boy—beautiful, really. Even more so than Connie had been. And seeing him there, under the blanket (and to have not one but two blankets and two mattresses), Benita was seized with an urge to gather him up and press her face into the soft skin of his neck, to breathe in the smell of boy and youth and sleep. She wanted, almost, to consume him—this best, most perfect piece of herself. She wanted to become him and in so doing become herself again. Benita Gruber, town beauty, innocent nineteen-year-old, a girl out of a silhouette.

But she let him sleep. His breath stirred the fuzzy threads of the blanket. He shuddered as she watched. What haunted his dreams? The blare of bomb sirens and the screech of planes over Berlin? The dead bodies they had stepped over in the rubble? Or God knows what from the “Children’s Home” the Gestapo had sent him to after Benita was imprisoned. She had never seen it. It was Marianne who had—miraculously—found Martin when Benita had given him up for dead. It was a typical Nazi establishment, Marianne had said of the home, lots of marching and no learning. Being Marianne, she focused on the ideology and not the creature comforts of the place. Was there enough to eat? Were the caretakers kind? Had there been time to play? These questions remained unanswered. But Marianne had found Martin and returned him to Benita, and for that Benita owed her everything.