She must have drifted off again because when she next opened her eyes, the room was empty. Benita sat with a start. Where was Martin? The blood raced to her head and then away. Surely he was all right. The war was over. They were not in Berlin anymore, they were at Burg Lingenfels, in the American zone, and it was safe here. They were under Marianne’s care.

But still, he had been taken from her once. She couldn’t survive it again.

Benita pulled a skirt over her nightgown and raced down the dark stone hall. Breathlessly, she found her way to the kitchen. It was empty. No sign of Martin, or anyone. Then she spotted movement outside the window. Two little figures—Fritz, Marianne’s boy, and Martin, crouched in the courtyard, poking sticks into a puddle. Relief flooded through her.

Thank you, thank you, dear God, for protecting my son . . . the prayer was involuntary, a nervous remnant of her Catholic upbringing. The religious pleas of her youth had returned to her in prison and served as an anchor in the endless sea of silence. Without them, she was sure her mind would have drifted away. She did not believe in them, but still, they had saved her—not God, just the words.

She knew she was lucky to have been sent to prison and not a concentration camp after Connie was executed for his role in the assassination plot. Ultimately, this was how all her yearning for nobility and a good marriage had paid off: as the wife of a traitor with a noble Prussian bloodline, she had received solitary confinement rather than death. She could recognize, if not yet laugh at, the grim humor of this. But the blankness that had entered her during that time lingered. She had spent too many hours staring at the ceiling, the backs of her hands, the corner of her cell where the paint was chipped. It was only for Martin’s sake that she now tried to overcome this.

As Benita stood watching the boys, Marianne banged into the kitchen, pulling a small cart of carrots and cabbages and even raspberries, which Benita had not seen in years. “God bless Herr Kellerman for keeping up the garden,” Marianne exclaimed. “There are not many men who were seeding potatoes and carrots last spring—and certainly not on someone else’s property.” She was flushed, and her hair formed a frizzy halo around her head. “Benita! How did you sleep, my poor dear? Have a bowl of porridge.” She gestured at a pot on the stove.

“Thank you,” Benita said.

Marianne was already removing a bowl from the cupboard—fine china, blue-and-white Meissen. “I can’t say it’s tasty, but it’s edible.” She plopped a helping into the bowl and set it on the table. “Sit. You are meant to eat and rest.”

So Benita sat.

She watched Marianne empty the cart, a whirlwind of vigorous, chaotic activity. The war had not changed her as much as it had everyone else. She was still an enigma to Benita, a woman capable of tracking Martin to some obscure Nazi hideaway but incapable of managing her own hair. When Benita first married Connie, she had marveled at the woman’s paradoxes. Marianne loved to entertain but cared nothing about food or fashion. She would slave away preparing the house for a fabulous party only to come down wearing last year’s dowdy dress. She would invite the most distinguished members of the Foreign Office and intelligence corps to dinner and then serve her cook’s homely Sauerbraten and Wildschweingulasch. She was an abstracted, disorganized mother to her children but an organized and efficient manager of adults.