Guy shook his head. “Tom was wounded in Ardennes, I know that much. Shot in the leg. He was shipped back to England and saw the last days of war out in a military hospital in London. Matthew told me about it, but he seemed quite tight-lipped about the
whole thing. I always got the sense there might have been a bit of bad blood between them, but I never got to the bottom of it, not that I asked.” He smiled apologetically at them both. “I’m sorry I don’t have more to tell you. You probably thought I did, inviting you to come all this way, but the truth is no one wants to talk about those days anymore. I was so glad someone took an interest.”
“We’re so glad we came,” Simon assured him, and Abby murmured the same. “You didn’t actually say what Matthew Weiss received his Cross for—do you remember specifically?”
“He interrogated some Nazi officers,” Guy said slowly, his tone heavy with sadness. “Thoroughly nasty characters, I’m sure. I heard from someone else that he’d got some information out of them about the camps. It couldn’t have been easy, in any respect, especially after seeing Wobbelin.”
“Thank you,” Simon said quietly. He glanced at Abby, his eyes dark with imagined sorrow. No, it couldn’t have been easy.
They stayed for another hour, looking over Guy’s photo albums and hearing more about his life both during the war and after. He’d married a woman he’d met after the war, a nurse, and they’d lived in Minneapolis for their whole marriage, until she’d died fifteen years ago. They hadn’t been able to have children.
“I feel as if I’ve lived a whole life in a matter of hours,” Abby said as they walked back to the car. It was already dusk, the air humid and warm, and as thick as a blanket. “I’m exhausted, but my mind is spinning.”
“Mine too.” Simon blew out a breath. “It’s all so incredible. I’m still taking it in.” He jangled his keys. “We can check into the hotel and order room service, unless you feel like going out?”
“No, that sounds perfect. I really am tired.”
They were both quiet, lost in their thoughts, during the short drive to the hotel. After they’d checked into their separate rooms, Abby joined Simon in his and he called down for room service.
It felt odd, and also intimate, to be sitting cross-legged on his bed while he asked her if she wanted anchovies in her Caesar salad. She made a face.
“Definitely not.”
“I had a feeling…” Simon murmured, his eyes glinting, and then he finished the order. “So.” He tossed his phone on top of the bureau as he gave Abby an appraising look. “The food should be here in about fifteen minutes. What did you think about Guy? Everything he said, now that you’ve had a bit of time to process it?”
She blew out a breath. “Honestly, I don’t know. It’s so much more than I expected. It felt so real—I mean, it was real. I know that. Such unbelievable devastation and tragedy, and yet you can forget about it, sort of, until you realize it actually happened to someone. Someone’s life was changed forever.” She let out a frustrated laugh. “I know I’m not making sense.”
“You are.”
“I feel sad, and somehow ashamed by it, too. I’m not sure why. It’s just so hard to believe people are capable of such evil.”
“I know. It’s a terrible stain on humanity.” Simon’s face was drawn in sorrowful, pensive lines. “You want to believe all Nazis were inhuman monsters, but they were people like us. They had wives and children and slept and laughed and all the rest. How could they have done such terrible, terrible things? How could anyone?”
“I don’t know, but it scares me, that someone could. We’re all only one step away from savagery.”
“An appalling thought, really.” Simon sighed and shook his head. “What do you think the bad blood was between your grandfather and Matthew Weiss?”
“Honestly, I have no idea.” Her head still felt as if it was spinning from everything Guy had said; she couldn’t grab hold of any of it.
“And so they must have been dating my grandmother and my great-aunt. Funny to think of that. I suppose neither relationship worked out.”
“You said you never met Lily?”
“No, not that I can recall. But I feel like I would have heard, if she’d married a German Jew whose family might have been killed in the Holocaust. That’s kind of a big thing, isn’t it? If I had cousins, I would have known, surely?”
“Second cousins, wouldn’t they be? And he was American by then.”
“Yes, but even so.” Simon shook his head. “It’s just a lot to never have even heard of. I suppose we could find out what happened to Matthaus Weiss. Do some digging, now that we have his real name, although I imagine there are a lot of Weisses out there, and we wouldn’t be able to go by his army experience since he used a different name.”
“Isn’t it funny,” Abby said slowly. “That we started wondering about Sophie Mather and Tom Reese, and now the real mystery is about Lily and Matthew, people we didn’t even know existed. At least I didn’t.”
“Of course, we still don’t know what happened between Tom and Sophie.”
“I think my father does,” Abby said quietly.
Simon raised his eyebrows, waiting.
“He doesn’t want to tell me, as you know, so Tom must have done something to be ashamed of. Something during the war, maybe. I think he knows the whole story, or at least most of it.”