In Germany, Ania lived in a retirement home, near Lake Constance. It was not far from Carsten’s farm or Burg Lingenfels—an hour by car, maybe—but she never went back. For ten years, after Carsten died, Wolfgang had worked the farm with minimal success. Their plot of land was too small to compete with the vast farming conglomerates Germany had established in the former east. Hitler’s Lebensraum aims achieved, this time in peace. So Wolfgang had sold the farm and moved north, near Lübeck, where he ran a farm equipment dealership.

At the front door of the bland, modern condominium in Newton where Mary lived since her divorce, there was a large manila envelope.

Mary glanced at the sender and tucked it under her arm as she turned her key. She looked discouraged. Ania felt a pang of guilt. She had hurt her daughter’s feelings. And over what? There was no purpose to this disagreement. She was an old woman. And her point of view was more dead, more irrelevant than the house.

The door swung open and sounds of children’s exuberant playing came from upstairs. “Helloo-oo,” Mary called out, tossing the package on the front hall table.

Martin Fledermann. Ania caught the name on the corner of the envelope and felt a rush of adrenaline.

“You are in touch with Martin?” she asked.

“It’s for you,” Mary said over her shoulder as she walked up the steps to the family room. “But don’t open it now—I want to show you.”

Ania stared at the package, absorbing this development. A package for her from Martin Fledermann, the tall, handsome, successful man whose nose she had once wiped, whose brow she had mopped when he was sick, whose little pants and shirts and sweaters she had mended and hemmed and layered on his body to make sure he was warm enough for the long walk to school. He was now a university professor here in America.

“Mama!” Mary’s six-year-old son, Gabriel, cried, flying across the floor and into his mother’s arms, wrapping his skinny, pajama-clad legs around hers, and burying his face in her belly. It was wonderful how free today’s children were, that a boy would offer such an affectionate, unregulated greeting.

“Can I order a pizza?” Sarah, Gabriel’s more even-tempered nine-year-old sister, asked from around the corner.

“Yes! Pizza, pizza, pizza!” Gabriel echoed, releasing his mother and bouncing in excitement. “I love pizza!”

“Did you get the chance to defrost that soup?” Mary called to Perla, the young woman who picked the children up from school and spent the afternoon with them. Mary was a lawyer for some sort of American nonprofit devoted to protecting the rights of immigrants. The relevance of her work as the daughter of a Nazi was not lost on Ania. What an amazing country this was.

“I make it in the freedgerator but eets not soft yet—” Perla replied, and her light, soft-voweled voice trilled on, accompanied by fervent, excited interruptions from Gabriel and dotted with questions from Mary’s lower, flatter tone.