reflection in a shop window. She was pleased with what she saw: a young woman with a black peacoat and pashmina around her shoulders, her long dark hair blowing in the breeze. She looked like she belonged here. Definitely not a tourist. And then she saw him, reflected in the glass, standing across the street. He looked so much like Rowan that for a minute her heart lodged in her throat. She had whirled around expecting it to be him.
She walked the rest of the way to her office, continually looking over her shoulder as if he might appear. When she got off the elevator in her office, Heidi half stood at the front desk and gave Ella an encouraging smile and a thumbs up as she walked by. As pleasant as Heidi normally was, it seemed such an unusual thing to do—even for Heidi—that it was then that Ella realized that Hugo must have told her about her famous Nazi grandfather. As soon as she made the connection, another, fiercer, urge grabbed her—the urge to forget it, let it go, turn away from it.
As she smiled at Heidi and walked to her office, she knew that Heidi—and others in the office—were watching her.
Granddaughter of a Nazi war criminal.
Ella entered her office and closed the door, then stood with her back against it. Her heart was pounding in her chest and she felt a warm flush spread to her face.
It wasn’t just her poor dead mother’s shame, she realized. This was what she had been trying to avoid thinking these last two weeks. It was the reason she had failed to call or visit or even drop a postcard to that poor old woman sitting in a nursing home in Dossenheim.
It was because it was her shame, too.
She went and sat at her computer and tried to compose herself, breathing deeply with her eyes closed. She held her hands over her computer keyboard and willed them to stop trembling but all she could think was: A monster’s blood runs through me.
It dawned on her how she had deliberately avoided any research online that might take her close to the identity of her maternal grandfather. And she was a professional investigator. She knew it wouldn’t involve much of a search. She knew she wouldn’t need to drill down very deeply to see his picture, hear his voice, discover his legacy.
And she didn’t dare go there. She couldn’t go there.
She signed on to her email account and caught herself doing what she had been doing for the last month: looking to see if there was an email from Rowan. Before she even checked, the very truth of her need struck her like a sharp slap. She would always look for him and never find him. She had let him go.
She had done that.
She turned away from the computer and buried her face in her hands, her sorrow building like a sickness spreading throughout her body. The sobs shook her body and she realized she didn’t care if anyone could hear her. When she stopped, her head on her arms on her desk, she knew what she had to do.
She sat up straight at the computer, and wiped her face.
I am stronger than this .
She opened up her browser and typed his name in the search engine window.
Two hours later she had learned the truth about Rudolf Vogel. In two hours she had cried every bit of her makeup off and carefully ignored two taps on her office door and three emails from Heidi asking her if she were okay.
In two hours she learned the whole truth about where she came from and why her mother hadn’t wanted to live.
As soon as she felt composed, Ella packed up her desk and folded her resignation letter into an envelope addressed to her supervisor. She timed it so that