Becca laughed and said, “Don’t be silly, Lizzie—I couldn’t ask you to do that. Kevin has already found a gardener to do it. I just wanted some advice about what to ask him for.”
I’d grown numb to my own boredom for the most part. I had a good life—and it was plenty busy when I wanted it to be, between chores and salon visits and dinners and lunch dates. But every now and again, something triggered a memory of a time when I thought my life would look different.
Even as I prepared to go to Becca’s house, I was reliving the disappointment of the moment when she told me someone else would do the gardening. Oh, how I would have loved to pull my boots on that day, to pack my gardening gloves and a notepad to sketch out plans. I’d have thrown myself into a project like that with wild abandon. The yard was a blank canvas, but I’d have turned it into green art.
As I locked the front door, I glanced down at the pavers, thinking about the splash of water I’d seen a few days earlier. Why would Sofie Rhodes make up such an absurd lie? It made no damned sense. I started to walk down the path toward the drive, but at the last second I spun around to stare at the porch, trying to remember exactly which pavers had been wet.
I didn’t believe the story about the cake. Of course I didn’t.
I set down my handbag and bent to inspect the pavers, feeling disloyal and foolish as I did. I was gratified to find no trace of smeared cake. But as I reached out to use the pillar to steady myself on my heels, I noticed a little chip of white ceramic embedded in the brick, just above my hand. As I brushed it with my fingertip, the ceramic chip fell to the pavers.
I looked around again, seeing my front porch with fresh eyes. If she had been standing at the door and she extended the cake toward him, and Henry took it from her and then lost his temper—
No.
That white chip in the brick was tiny. It could have been anything—even a tiny stone baked into the brick when it was crafted. There were other explanations here and my brother deserved my trust.
I scooped my bag up again and started toward my car, but I skimmed my gaze across the young red buckeye plants in the garden bed along the front of the porch. I felt a pit form in my stomach. He’d missed one jagged shard of ceramic about halfway along the bushes, sitting among leaves. When I bent to retrieve it, I found it sticky with light-colored frosting and a smudge of dark cake, rich with tiny black seeds.
And when I checked through the trash can, I found one unholy mess of cake and plate and dirt, wrapped in newspaper and buried in the bottom.
34
Sofie
Berlin, Germany
1939
Jürgen and Karl came home for a week’s vacation in June that year. I’d seen Jürgen for a few days around Adele’s funeral, but we were both so soaked in grief I’d barely looked at him then. This trip was different. In all those months we spent apart, Gisela learned to crawl and be terrified of strangers—she now cried whenever Jürgen tried to pick her up. And over those months apart, Jürgen changed too.
He was quiet, spending long hours alone in his study even though he was supposed to be taking a break. After a few days of this, I stood in front of his desk. He looked up from a blueprint and his gaze was hollow.
“We need to go for a walk and enjoy this beautiful summer day,” I said flatly, propping my hand on my hip. “I am going to put Gisela in the stroller. I’ll see you outside in a moment.”
He didn’t even try to argue. He heard in my tone that I would not be deterred. We began to walk toward the park, and when we reached it, I motioned toward a shaded bench beneath a large linden tree. There we sat side by side, and I turned Gisela around to face us. She eyed Jürgen warily.
“This last year has been very difficult, but the technology is more marvelous than even I dreamed it could be. The next prototype is the A4. This rocket will launch vertically, straight up like this.” Slowly, almost dreamily, he raised his hand. “It will ascend at an angle we’ve calculated with incredible precision—every movement stabilized and guided by a finely tuned gyroscope. After maybe a minute, the propulsion ends. Now this rocket is somewhere in the order of sixty miles straight up. Maybe it even comes near the edge of space. Isn’t that remarkable?”
“Sixty miles—”
“But this is just the culmination point,” he interrupted, his expression twisting until he looked disgusted. “Because now it starts its descent, and it travels just above the speed of sound. Do you know what that means?” I shook my head, but he didn’t seem to notice. He brought his hand down sharply into a fist on the other side of his lap, then snapped it open, exposing his palm. “The accuracy and range will be beyond anything the world has ever seen. And the missile travels faster than the sound it produces, so there is no warning at all—certainly no time for an air raid siren. Say we launch this from the border, as a family in France or Poland or Belgium or Switzerland sits in their kitchen eating their breakfast. That family is gone before they ever knew something was coming for them. The mother has no time to scream to the father that she’s going to get the baby. The father has no time to push his son into the cellar to save his life.”