Ania’s eyes drifted back to the package. She had hoped Martin would drive down from New Hampshire to see her, but the “timing had not worked” for such a reunion, and she had tried to conceal her disappointment. He was the one person she had remained in touch with from the castle. But now here was this package—whatever it might be. It pleased her to think that he had made the effort to send her something, and that he and Mary had spoken about it. They were children from two different chapters of her life, in touch only because she had introduced them. By the time Mary was born, Martin was nearly a teenager, away at boarding school.

“Hi, Omi,” Gabriel said from the top step, and Ania realized she had missed his greeting the first time. At his mother’s prodding, surely, from the way she stood beside him, one hand on his small shoulder.

“Ah! Hello, my child!” Ania said in her brightest language-school English, clapping her hands together.

“Hello.” Gabriel became suddenly shy, rolling his head against his mother’s hip, bending one leg so he could grab his ankle. He was an unfamiliar specimen to Ania—an exotic hothouse flower from this time of plenty. She found him both vexing and lovely.

“Did you finish the puzzle?” she asked, selecting her words carefully. For many years now, she had squeezed into a tiny desk at the local elementary school for night classes in English so she might learn the language that would be her grandchildren’s. But now when she needed them, the words seemed buried in quicksand.

Gabriel shook his head a little sadly. “It’s too hard for me.”

“No,” Ania said. “That cannot be. Come show your omi.”

The boy did not move from his mother’s side. He was a perceptive child and seemed to understand that he owed his grandmother some particular respect or delicacy. But he was not a natural pleaser. He lived in his own world with its own prescriptions and edicts, which he was not in the habit of amending. Ania could see this sort of thing now, in the luxury of her old age. How her own children had been, what they had loved and hated . . . there had been no time for such reflections when they were young. It gave her a pang of sadness, looking at Gabriel here, and knowing him this well.

“Go on,” his mother said, giving him a little push. “I bet Omi can help you.”

And so Ania extended her hand and tried, with her smile, to show him she understood his reluctance and did not hold it against him, that she was not actually scary even though she was so old. But he did not look up at her. He took her cool fingers in his own warm hand and pulled her across the floor like a burden.

Mary had been stubborn as a girl. Ania remembered this much. More nuance, more understanding she had not granted the child. She had been born in the beginning of the Wirtschaftswunder—that somnambulant time of sudden plenty that had swept Germany like a dream. They had been poor in comparison to Mary’s classmates in town, but compared to Anselm and Wolfgang, Mary was raised in the lap of luxury and good fortune, with milk and eggs and chocolate to eat, new shoes to wear, and even, when she turned five years old, a car to share with the Glebers. Unlike her half brothers, Mary had grown up without typhoid and diphtheria and rape. She had not been pressed into overcrowded trains and transport vehicles and fetid, swarming, waterless DP camps full of war-hardened souls. She had always had school, and clothing, and medicine, and a roof over her head.