The closest section of forest behind the castle remains. Spiky peaks of the pines rise like a mountain range at the edge of the meadow. From here it looks just as it always did. Ania would like to cross the uneven grass and enter, but she doesn’t trust her footing on the rutted earth, so she sits on the stone wall beside the road and remembers.

These woods are where she and her boys buried Rainer. They wrapped his wasted body in a sheet and carried it from the castle, light as a child’s. Ania felt nothing but relief. He was no longer her husband but her secret, a man who had made the wrong choice at every turn. And she had made her own bad choice in him. He was the second great mistake of her life. Her first was believing in Hitler. And in the awkward, distinctly human weight of Rainer’s body—the cold, lifeless shoulder bumping against her leg with every step—she felt the extremity of her bad judgment.

The grave was shallow, the earth was nearly frozen, and when Rainer’s body lay at the bottom, Ania and her boys paused by unspoken agreement. She did not pray: What would she have prayed for? And from whom? A God she was certain did not exist? If there was a hell, Rainer was bound for it.

But as she stood, she willed herself to remember the boy she had befriended so many years ago in her father’s waiting room. The boy who had walked his own sickly father to Doktor Fortzmann’s once a week for treatment, who had allowed the old man to lean heavily on his narrow shoulders, offering him sips of water from a canteen he had thought to pack. He was a good son. And in the beginning, he had been a good husband: considerate, enthusiastic, dutiful. He had been steady in his love—so utterly convinced from an early age that she was meant to be his wife.

And as they stood above his lifeless body, it occurred to Ania that the darkness in him was her fault. She had never returned his passion. She had never loved him enough. Maybe his sins as well as her own rested on her back.

Beside her, Wolfgang toed the earth sullenly. Anselm was more inscrutable, face bowed, hands deep in his pockets. She could not ask him what he was thinking; there was too much water under the bridge. But still there was a solace in their togetherness. If she had taught her boys one thing, it was silence—they could navigate its shoals and currents like born sailors. And in its open waters, they met one another—three ships blinking their lights across the darkness, communicating without language, enough to say, I know you, we come from the same country.

It was two weeks later that Ania learned of Benita’s death.

And with this death, she was alone in her mourning. Her sons had always kept their distance from the beautiful young mother in their midst. And Marianne, who surely shared her grief, would never speak to her again.