Martin sighed. “I would love to, Marianne, but I don’t know—”

“Stop.” She lifted a hand. “Don’t say no. I won’t let you say no. Think about it first. It is the wish of an old woman. Think of it, if you want, as my last wish.”

Martin looked at her: the thin gray hair, the fragile, papery skin of her face. “Why do you want me to come with you?”

Marianne cocked her head to the side. “Why do you think, Martin Fledermann?”

“Because I am my father’s son.” He sighed.

“No,” Marianne said, knitting her brows. “Because you are your mother’s son.”

It was not decided in that moment.

The sun sank lower in the sky, and at Marianne’s formidable insistence, Martin took her for a swim.

“Swim where?” he asked when she proposed the idea.

“Where?” Marianne laughed. “Look around you, Martin Fledermann. The sea.”

The swim trunks she provided were folded dustily on the top shelf of the towel closet: a voluminous pair of brightly flowered shorts—a style Martin dimly recalled from his early days in America as “jams.” Her son-in-law’s, apparently. Martin was a good swimmer, albeit out of practice. As a boy, he had been the star of the Salem swim team. But it was years since he had swum in the ocean, and never with an eighty-three-year-old.

Marianne wore a blue-skirted suit with violent splotches of purple. Against this, her skin was a pale greenish-gray, finely webbed with wrinkles. Her arm was looped through a bright pink inner tube.

“Ah,” she said, beaming. “My swim escort.”

“You really want to do this?” he asked, as lightly as possible, though in fact he felt vaguely panicked. He might be responsible for Marianne von Lingenfels’s drowning. People would shake their heads and wonder what sort of idiot had allowed an old woman to climb into the cold northern Atlantic Ocean.

“Come,” Marianne said. “We will have an adventure.” She wrapped his hand under her arm and clutched it against her bony rib cage.

From the porch, there was a dusty path and a set of wooden steps over the rocks, which led to the dock. His bare feet smarted against the rough dirt, and a rivulet of sweat trickled down through the thin patch of hair on his chest. It was still blazing hot in the direct sun, but he did not falter.

And walking, he was struck suddenly by the memory of swimming in the small, gravel-shored German lake where they would picnic on Sundays after the war. “Schwimmen!” Marianne would bark at his mother and Ania and their children. “Nicht sitzen!” To Marianne, sitting and eating and skipping stones without first plunging in and swimming at least as far as the float was tantamount to sloth. She herself would swim all the way to the other side with her oddly effective head-above-the-water version of the crawl. She was so utterly German in those moments, so determined and so filled with the folksy belief in physical activity and the trappings of innocence, it was hard to separate her from the Teutonic forces she and Albrecht and Martin’s father had spent their lives conspiring against. And it was with simmering resentment that Martin would set out behind her, overtake her, and swim until his lungs almost burst.