Marianne takes a deep breath. She must say something. But an apology is all that comes to mind. She is not sure for what.

“You would think . . .” she says finally, and her voice sounds foreign to her own ears. “You would think from this introduction that I must be a very wonderful person.” There is more laughter. The audience is relieved that she has opened her mouth. “And that I must have answers and secrets of how to be good and . . . how to see evil and resist it, and everything else Claire said.”

Outside, a crow squawks from the parapet.

“Instead,” Marianne continues, “I look out at you and I see so many familiar faces—so many people I have known and not known, so many people I have lost . . . And I see, most of all, my own blind spots.”

The audience is very quiet. In the front row, Claire looks anxious.

And as Marianne stands, gripping the podium, her eyes find Ania, sitting in the front row, between her daughter and Martin. She is so small—such a tiny person. How is it that in all those years Marianne never noticed this? And her face, her dear face, so deeply lined and etched with grooves and wrinkles, the bed of a violent river.

Ania returns her gaze. And as the silence grows, she nods, ever so slightly, as if to say, Go on, continue. I am here, no matter what you say.

A memory rises in Marianne’s mind: That night, so many years ago, when she and Ania waited together while the Russians feasted. The dark, uneasy quiet of the castle, the flickering shadows of the fire, and, outside, the suspended carcass of Gilda’s body. She can hear the crackle of sparks and the strange sounds of the men’s voices gathering into a low and otherworldly song. How grateful she had been to have Ania beside her—a fellow adult and human being, connected not through allegiance to any group or party or particular way of thinking but through the reality of the moment, through their shared will to get through the next hours, the next day, and the one afterward, and through their shared determination to keep their children safe.

It is the great regret of her life that she lost this—no, that she forsook it. And that she lost Benita, too—her sweet, flawed friend, fellow widow and human being, whom Marianne can see now that she, in her own way, betrayed.

“I want to say,” she begins again, “I want to say that I have not always tried hard enough to know. That this ‘moral compass’ Claire talks about may not have been as helpful in my own personal life as it was in the wider political context. Sometimes it is easier to see clearly from a distance. And what is up close—what is up close”—she falters—“is harder to make out.”

In the audience someone coughs.

“There is so much gray between the black and the white . . . and this is where most of us live, trying—”