Free The Ambassador's Daughter by Pam Jenoff

considers her too vulnerable and weak to be trusted. I do not want to bother her now, while she is so worried about Emilie.
    She picks up some knitting needles and yarn beside her. Her hands are so often in motion, playing the piano, knitting—like two birds she needs to keep occupied so they don’t fly away.
    “So have you made any decisions?” she asks abruptly.
    “Excuse me?”
    “When we last spoke, you were trying to figure out what you were going to do.” She watches me expectantly, as though I was supposed to have remolded my life plan in a few short weeks. Why must I do at all? As a girl, no one expected me to do or be—I just was, a happy state of affairs that I should have liked to carry on indefinitely. In truth, our conversation and Krysia’s challenge had prickled at me nonstop since our last meeting. But I have no new answers. There have always been expectations: I will be wife to Stefan, a mother someday if his condition still permits it. Those things just meant being an appendage to the lives of others, I see now. Could that possibly be enough?
    “You have a real gift with words,” she adds when I do not answer. “Have you ever considered being a writer?”
    I laugh, toss my head. “A writer? What would I say? You have to have more than just words—you need life experience and I have so little of that.”
    “Where will you go after the conference?” she asks, trying an easier question.
    “Back to Berlin with Papa, I suppose.”
    She scrutinizes her knitting, then pulls out a stitch. “Why? Why not see a bit of the world now, while you can?”
    “But my fiancé...”
    “Ah yes, you mentioned him the other night, fleetingly. Once you go back to him, there will be a wedding, then children. There will always be something to stop you. You only have right now. Go while you can.”
    “I’ll go back to Stefan after the conference,” I say stubbornly.
    “You sound enthralled.”
    “I didn’t mean it that way.” But it isn’t my tone that she has taken issue with—it is the fact that I am going back at all.
    “Is that what you want?”
    I start to say yes, then stop. It is a lie.
    “Then why go?”
    “Because he is my fiancé. And he was badly wounded.”
    I expect her to ask how he was hurt, the seriousness of his injuries. “Do you love him?” I’m not sure what love is, really. When I was fifteen, Stefan and our tiny neighborhood, the park where we would walk together, and our quiet cinema dates, were the only world I had ever known. Stefan would have changed during the war.
    “I care for him.”
    “That isn’t the same.”
    “I know.” I turn to gaze out the window at the courtyard below. “I feel so differently now.”
    “Or maybe you feel the same, but you’ve changed and so those feelings are no longer enough.”
    I consider this. Part of me has always sensed that there were differences. I recall a conversation Stefan and I had once about my mother. I’d found an old playbill from a show she’d done in Morocco and shown it to him. “How exciting,” I remarked, “to have traveled the world.”
    But Stefan had looked at me blankly. With everything he wanted right here in Berlin—his family and me—he had no desire to leave. “It must have been terribly difficult,” he replied, “not to mention dangerous.”
    I could see it in his eyes, too, the day he left for the army. “You’ll get to go so many places,” I’d offered as we stood on the platform and said goodbye, trying to force optimism into my voice. “Belgium, Holland, maybe even France.” But Stefan had never wanted to leave in the first place, whereas I could not wait to go. No, the differences were there even before the war, but it had taken the years apart to make me perceive them clearly. Now they are magnified, not just by time, but the ways in which I had changed, as well.
    “Maybe,” I reply to Krysia. “We were so young and four years apart feels like a lifetime. Sometimes he seems more like