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“I didn’t realize I was going to cry that much,” she said eventually. She felt empty now, but not in a bad way. Exhausted, too. “I thought maybe a few artful tears, you know, glassy eyes, a hitch in my voice, that sort of thing. All very dignified.”
Simon shook his head, smiling. “Nope.”
“Nope,” Abby agreed. She felt absolutely spent, as if she’d run a marathon. She stared down at the balled tissue in her hand. “What now?” she asked eventually. “Is this where you tell me I need to forgive myself?”
“No, because you already know that.”
She sighed. “Yes, I do.”
“If you want me to tell you something, then it would be to talk to your father. Honestly.”
“I’ve tried,” Abby said, although she knew she hadn’t. Not properly. “It’s hard.”
“I’m sure it is.”
She glanced at him uncertainly. “So have I freaked you out, Mr. Emotionally Unavailable?” she made herself ask. “Or is this removed enough from your life that it’s not making you uncomfortable?”
SIMON
Simon would have laughed, except it all cut a little too close to the bone. “You haven’t freaked me out,” he said, but Abby wasn’t fooled.
“But?”
Simon hesitated. All the while he’d held her in his arms, longing to give her comfort, he’d painfully felt his own shortcomings. His own silences. Because if Abby was going to lay herself bare for him, then surely he had to do the same?
But was now really the time? This was about Abby—her grief, her past, her problem. Not his. And yet even as the thought flickered through him, Simon knew it was a cowardly cop-out.
“But you’ve made me feel that I should be as honest with you as you’ve been with me,” he said with a heavy sigh. Even now he didn’t want to do it. He knew it might change things between them, and not for the better.
Abby’s reddened, swollen eyes widened. “What do you mean?”
“For fifteen years you’ve struggled with guilt and regret over one moment,” Simon explained slowly, “one decision you made in an instant that you wished you’d done differently. I’m the opposite. I’ve had fifteen years of moments, of decisions I wished I done differently.”
“Do you mean your divorce?”
“No,” Simon answered, and it almost, but not quite, felt like a relief. “I’m talking about my daughter.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Boizenburg, June 1945
“Captain to see you, Lawson.”
Matthew gave a terse nod as he turned from the window and its view of the pretty main square of the town of Boizenburg, on the banks of the Elbe, thirty miles west of Ludwigslust.
After the war had officially ended, after Wobbelin, he’d been assigned to this small military government office to round up and interrogate local Nazis, some of whom desperately denied their involvement, others who, in their terror or defeat, were all too eager to help.
Matthew felt absolutely nothing for any of them—not pity, not hatred, not even disdain. Something had frozen hard and solid inside him and would not be shifted, which at least made interrogation rather easy.
There was no question of him losing control; he would not be moved by anything these wretched men said—not by their clear-eyed arrogance or their pathetic sniveling; not their recitation of unimaginably evil facts without a shred of emotion or their absurd denials of even knowing about the camps they’d already been identified as running. There had been a camp right in Boizenburg, until the very end of the war.
Before being posted here, Matthew had been granted three days’ leave to return to Fraustadt, to find what he could of his family.
It hadn’t been an easy journey, for the country was in complete chaos, soldiers everywhere, of every stripe, fraternizing, arguing, and enjoying what paltry pleasures a conquered Germany could offer them.
Matthew had heard stories, and seen things too—soldiers breaking into homes, taking what they liked, including the women. He’d heard of the suicides of high-ranking Nazis, and how Berlin, along with the whole country, would be carved up like a Christmas goose. He found he didn’t care about any of it; he couldn’t, because to let in so much as a flicker of feeling was to acknowledge the utter, awful vastness seething beneath, and to do that was unthinkable. Unbearable. Impossible. He needed to stay cold.
Fraustadt and the surrounding area had been occupied by the Soviets since February, and so he’d had to ask, bluster, cajole, and sometimes bribe, his way back home. He owed particular gratitude to a sympathetic Soviet officer who spoke German, respected Matthew’s uniform, and allowed him passage on a military transport all the way to Dresden.
