Looking into his dark eyes, it hits her that there’s more on the line than she thought. People always talk about falling in love like it’s a standardized state of being, that the experience is the same for everyone, every time. But it isn’t. She didn’t recognize it because it was so different than it was with Adam. She works to find the right words, but she knows that all he really wants is the plain, unedited truth. Bare and open, just like him.
“I know I was wrong to lie. But I did it because I’m falling in love with you,” she says, heart hammering. He doesn’t move, just continues to stare. “My marriage really is over; I just wasn’t divorced on paper yet, and I wanted to start fresh with you, without all the goddamn baggage.” She’d tried to avoid it, but she knows now that you can’t. You just have to learn to carry it. The muscles of your trauma strengthen, and eventually it weighs less than it did at the start. “And because I lost a pregnancy in the accident along with my parents, and I’ve felt nothing but fucking lonely and broken ever since, and I think you might actually be able to make me feel like a whole person again, and it all kind of terrifies me.” She gallops to the end of the emotional sprint and exhales shakily.
Ian’s eyes are on her, one hand still holding his forgotten coffee. The colour is rising in his neck. He’s still invested. And he wouldn’t have sat down to talk in the first place if he didn’t want to try to fix this.
He blinks fast. “I’m so sorry, Kate. I was being a prat. Come here.”
They push their chairs back with a choral scrape and embrace each other. She presses her eyes shut, relief flooding her body as she sinks into the comfort of his chest, a bed of cable cotton and peace, the scent of coffee and warm wood.
Kate spends a good portion of the afternoon upstairs in her room. After her conversation with Ian, she’d picked up Audrey, and the pair of them stopped at the supermarket before making their way back to the Oakwood. Both were quiet, each absorbed in her own thoughts of the past.
She takes a hot bath, closes her eyes and inhales the steam. Lets the soapy rose-scented water rinse the soot from the memories as her thoughts flow over one another, of Adam and the pregnancy. Her parents. Audrey. The future she’s glimpsed with Ian.
It’s dusk by the time she dries off and changes into pyjamas. She turns on the lamps, then pulls out the box of photos from the floor of the wardrobe where she stashed them the day she moved in. She finds the ones that prompted her to google the Oakwood in the first place, and shuffles through them again. They look different to her now that she knows the place so well. Outside, the steely grey sky grows darker by the minute. She looks forward to the spring, when the lawns will be lush and green, casting shadow over the winding, narrow road, the gardens full of wildflowers and thistle, just like in the photo.
Kate sets aside the picture of her parents beside the sign, makes a mental note to ask Audrey if it would be all right to hang it in the lobby or the library. But then she realizes the Oakwood might not be home for her much longer and she’ll want to take the picture with her wherever she ends up next. She thinks of Ian, wonders what sort of life they might have together, and where.
She goes to her dresser, removes the little jewellery box with the locket inside. She holds the small oval in her hands and runs a thumb over the surface, thinking of her parents staying in this room. She had to come all the way up here just to find them—and herself—again. She can bring them with her into the new life she’s forging, but only if she has the courage to listen to Audrey. To forgive herself. After a pause, Kate heads back into the bathroom, where she dampens a Q-tip and cleans the dried blood off the clasp. Condensation still encircles the edges of the mirror, but she sees her reflection clearly. Her red hair is damp and a little frizzy, slung over one shoulder. She puts the necklace on and caresses the silver, cool against her hot skin as she reunites with a lost piece of herself.
Chapter 35
Audrey
VECHTA, GERMANY | SPRING – AUTUMN 1939
The morning after their arrival at the prison, a loud voice called for Audrey outside her cell. Her heart skipped as keys rattled in the lock, and a guard entered.
For a moment, hope flared—that they were going to tell her there’d been a mistake, that Friedrich had found some way to secure her release.
“You’re next for Dr. Adler,” the guard said, beckoning.
Audrey looked to Wendelein, who was lounging on the top bunk. “They just want to check for VD and lice,” she said, flipping over onto her stomach and peering down at Audrey. “All the prisons do it.”
The night before, they had curled up in their bunks under insufficient blankets, listening to the motors and screams of planes flying overhead from the Luftwaffe airfield nearby as they laid out all that had happened to them in the preceding months, and how each had ended up at Vechta. Wen told Audrey about her time with the Red Orchestra, aiding both the Dutch and German resistance efforts. She still didn’t know how their cell had been discovered, but could only assume one of their contacts had turned, or been interrogated beyond toleration and given them up in exchange for some leniency. Wen had evaded capture for three weeks before she was arrested and sent to her first prison, from whence she’d escaped—twice.
The first time, she’d bribed a guard who fancied her to leave the outer gate unlocked at the end of his watch. But he reneged on the deal, alerted his superior, and she had been on the run for only thirty minutes before she was recaptured and sent back. The second time, she managed to goad two of her fellow inmates into a fistfight to distract the guards, allowing her to slip out through a gap under the fence that she had slowly tunnelled during their exercise hours.
“For some reason they didn’t just shoot me, the idiots,” Wen had said with a scoff. “They sent me here instead.”
Audrey found Wen almost mythological in existence: a baroness of high pedigree; a rebellious, educated woman with a hatred of authority and a thirst for adrenaline. She seemed to fear nothing but captivity.
Audrey followed behind the guard now, cradling her aching hands. She didn’t want to undergo the physical examination, but perhaps the doctor might be able to set her broken fingers.
Dr. Adler was an older gentleman, heavyset with grey hair and glasses, and was surprisingly gentle, a welcome reprieve from the harsh shoves and barks of the guards. He tsked as he assessed her bruised fingers over the top of his spectacles. “What happened to them?”
Audrey told him baldly of the assault, and he winced.
“And when was that?” he asked.
Audrey shrugged. Time had slipped by during her arrest and detainment, too fast for her to grasp it, yet somehow torturously slow.
“I don’t know exactly,” she said. “A week, maybe?”
Dr. Adler frowned. “I shall do my best. You’ll need to be able to work,” he added quietly, glancing at the closed door beyond which stood the guard. “Things will be worse for you if you can’t work.”
There were five broken fingers between her two hands, and each had to be set individually. Audrey bit down and tried not to cry out as Dr. Adler worked, apologizing after every crunching thrust. By the time he was finished, they were both sweating, and Audrey panted in pain. But it was duller now, less pronounced. Her fingers felt hot.
“Try to move them a little. Just a little,” Dr. Adler said.
She hesitated but did. “It’s better than before,” she said, as tears slipped down her cheeks. “A bit.”
“Let’s hope it takes,” he said. “Enough to get by, anyway.”
Vechta Prison, Audrey soon learned, was effectively a workhouse for homegrown German and Allied irritants, women like her and Wendelein who acted as resisters to the Reich, either within Germany or in the surrounding countries. It became evident that Germany was in full-on preparation mode for a war, and the women of Vechta were being utilized as free factory labour. They knitted socks for faceless German soldiers, men whose names they didn’t know, whom they would never meet, and who, at the rate things were going with Hitler’s rumoured new agreement with the Soviets, might very well be lying dead on a battlefield with three bullets in their chest by the time the socks reached their regiment. Other one-off projects were sometimes set up in the mess hall—assembling radio transmitters or sewing parachutes by hand.
Once her fingers healed well enough, Audrey took her spot on a bench in the mess hall. Her nanny, Sophie, had taught her needlepoint, but not knitting, as her father had believed it to be an activity more fit for the likes of servants and middle-class grandmothers. So it was in prison that Audrey learned how to manage the needles, modifying the proper form and accepting help from Wen to accommodate the limitations of her damaged hands. She had grieved the loss of them, and put to rest any feeble dream of ever playing the piano again. That skill, that joy, along with so much else, was now part of a past life to which she could never return. But she played music in her head. She was still composing Ilse’s theme in her mind, trying to polish that always-unfinished piece of herself as she toiled away at her workstation.
During the countless hours spent in the factory, the laundry, or tending the prison garden, Audrey’s thoughts swirled around nothing but Ilse. Daniel and Friedrich too. What they were doing, whether they remained safe and undetected. Her nights were filled with vivid nightmares of what might have happened to them, and, as always, the explosion in Hanover, the confused faces of the children in their fleeting, final moments.
She and Wen were desperate for information from the outside, and they strained their ears for snippets of news whenever the guards gossiped to each other in low tones. From what they overheard, it sounded as though Europe was on the precipice of war. Just as Ira, her father, and Friedrich had predicted.
When they weren’t knitting or repairing radios, they peeled mountains of potatoes for the thin, revolting soup that allegedly constituted a meal. Potatoes made up the bulk of it—there never seemed to be any shortage of them—but the rest came from the slop from the adjoining men’s prison, the bones and carrot peelings left over from their heartier stews. As always seemed to be the case, women were meant to subsist on the dregs that remained once men had had their fill.
She and Wen were always starving—intellectually as well as physically.
A month after her arrival, a loud knock at their cell door jarred them both.
