“When the war ended, why did my mother go to you instead of her family?” Martin asked, startling Marianne. She had almost forgotten he was sitting across from her, wrapped in his own cloak of grief. He had grown tall in the last months at school, and his legs sprawled across the aisle, his shoulders hunched forward like folded wings.

“It made sense at the time,” Marianne said. “Everything was mixed up. No one was where they started. And I don’t think—” She stopped herself. She was unsure what Benita had relayed to Martin about her family.

“What?” Martin pressed.

Marianne sighed. “I don’t think she was close to her family.”

Martin turned to stare back out the window. One after another poor, dilapidated farm flew past—prosperity had returned to Germany but not to this corner of the country. Martin did not ask the obvious question: Why, then, had Benita gone back to Frühlinghausen in September? His mother must have offered him some sort of explanation. And whatever it was, it had not turned him against Marianne. For that she was grateful. Benita had “died in her sleep,” according to the telegram. But Marianne had understood. It was her fault Benita was dead. Her meddling had killed her. She would never outlive this.

What Martin understood of his mother’s death remained unclear.

He was an inscrutable boy. Not just now, in his grief, but always. Unlike Fritz, no matter where Martin went, he was well liked. He was popular with his peers and with his teachers, the kind of boy parents were happy to invite to their homes. He was agreeable and excelled in school, but what he cared about, what he felt passion for, remained mysterious. He had inherited his father’s likability without his streak of rebellion and strong-mindedness.

“Will you recognize your aunts?” she asked him.

“Lotte and Gertrud?” Martin looked worried. He had met them only a few times.

“Never mind,” Marianne said. “We’ll find them together.”

Martin did recognize them, though, thank God, because Marianne never would have identified the two drab, middle-aged ladies waiting on the platform as Benita’s sisters. One was tall and square jawed and wore incongruously peaky cat-eye glasses. Her graying hair was tucked into several neat but unartful rolls. The other was medium height and softer in appearance, with a wide, doughy face and bright blue eyes. Neither looked anything like Benita. Where had she come from?

“Tante Lotte? Tante Gertrud?” Martin asked, approaching the women with childish uncertainty. The taller of the two nodded. But she offered no smile, no warm greeting, no expression of condolence—only a grim nod and a handshake—one for Martin and one for Marianne. At least the dough-faced sister, who introduced herself as Gertrud, gave Martin an awkward pat on the shoulder. Marianne felt sorrow for her dead friend—how could a woman who had so loved beauty and fine things have lived here with these stark sisters, in this ugly place?

A memory rose to the surface: a day in the early summer, shortly before they had moved from Burg Lingenfels. She and Benita and Ania and all the children had taken a picnic out to the hillside—an old tablecloth from Weisslau, embroidered by Albrecht’s grandmother, a basket of cold meatballs and potato salad, pickles, fresh plums, a thermos of coffee, and Ania’s butter cake with raisins. The hayfield buzzed with insects and meadowlarks and smelled of hot grass and flowering nettles. Below them a field of rapeseed bloomed a brilliant, otherworldly yellow. The air above shimmered with heat. Marianne had brought a camera, the first one she had ever owned, and snapped pictures of the children running helter-skelter. This is what we live for, isn’t it? Benita had said, her face flushed with happiness.