The German Child by Catherine Hokin

Author:Catherine Hokin [Hokin, Catherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-01-24T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 17

BIRMINGHAM, FEBRUARY 1980

She’s found more than a handful of photographs. She’s holding something back.

Helen Ritter had very little in common with her daughter, but they shared one trait: they’d both learned the value of self-preservation. Where they differed was that Evie’s need to take refuge in that state only ever surfaced around her mother. Helen’s applied to every facet of her life. She put the receiver down a second after Evie cut the call off, but she didn’t stand beside the telephone table picking over the conversation. She didn’t waste her time wondering what Evie was doing. She focused on herself and her fury.

We should have left her behind in Berlin.

That wasn’t a new thought. It was a certainty which Helen had nurtured over the years, breathing new life into it every time the child tried to insert herself and her exhausting demands into her and Ulrich’s lives. She’d never felt guilty about thinking it; she’d never tried to suppress the emotion. She would have gladly shared the sentiment with Evie on multiple occasions, except that the story they’d always told her was that she’d been born in America, and the story was everything.

Unless she does what she seems to be intent on doing and tears our lives down. Then I’ll tell her exactly how I feel.

Helen walked from the hallway into the living room, poured herself a brandy and sat down on the couch. The sun had set but the sky was rich and clear, and the fairy lights which Ulrich – because he would always be Ulrich not Alex in her head – had twisted round the trees were twinkling through the branches like trapped stars. Helen sipped her drink and watched the show. She loved this house. Its shingled roof and shuttered windows and the arched portico which framed the front door reminded her of the stately villas which sat beside the lake in Wannsee, Berlin’s most sought-after borough. The ones her mother had sighed over as if they were palaces on summer day trips out of the city.

This is where I belong. This is my reward. I’m not going to lose it or any other part of our life, not after I’ve worked so hard to get us here.

Helen shook herself. That wasn’t right. Achieving a new life hadn’t been her doing alone. It had never been I with them; it had always been we and us. She and Ulrich had worked as one since they first met, and nothing about that had changed with the war’s end. Their bond was unbreakable; it was where they drew their strength from. And they had never shied away from doing whatever was needed to protect the only thing which mattered: each other. That was as true now as it had been in 1945, when they’d laid down the roots for all that came next…

‘The scientists the Americans are rounding up are going to be sent to a research facility called Huntsville in Alabama. I’ve heard the soldiers

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.