The Girl in the Photo: A completely gripping and heart-wrenching World War 2 novel (Hanni Winter Book 3) by Catherine Hokin

Author:Catherine Hokin [Hokin, Catherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781800197046
Publisher: Bookouture
Published: 2023-01-26T13:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 13

15 APRIL 1950, PRAGUE

She was a stranger, so he has to be too.

Hanni hadn’t slept all night; neither had Freddy. And neither one of them had acknowledged that the other was awake.

The flat had been a fraught place since Wednesday night. Both of them were wary of the other; both of them were still raw from their row. Both of them, however, were trying to breach the divide.

Freddy had softened a little. He had managed to step back from his anger and, whatever he had said about no longer listening to Hanni, he had taken some notice of her words. He acknowledged that Renny could suffer if his confrontation with her parents turned ugly or violent. He promised that snatching her would be his last, not his first, resort. Hanni in turn promised that she believed him, and she tried hard to make that promise true. It was a step or two towards each other, but it wasn’t the reconciliation they both craved and couldn’t admit to desperately needing. They were both still a long way out of reach.

To keep herself physically out of Freddy’s way, Hanni had commandeered the small bathroom and turned it into a darkroom, ready to develop Renny’s photographs. She had stopped halfway through setting up the first chemical bath. There was no way now to get the pictures to the child. Freddy had asked her not to meet with Jana again before Saturday – he hadn’t been unkind enough to say, ‘I don’t trust you not to warn her,’ but the implication was there. And Hanni could hardly take the pictures to a lunch she was supposed to pretend was a happy coincidence. So she had packed her precious materials away and fretted instead.

Her brain had been spinning round the invitation to visit the Novotnýs since Freddy had sprung it on her. With the fear of what Freddy would do. With the fear of how Renny – and Jana – would react if he declared who he was and what he wanted. There had been so many what ifs competing for space in her head. It was two o’clock on Friday morning before the most frightening one hit her. What if Luca is right? What if I know the father? What if he knows me? The impossibility of where that could lead to had crept over her in the dark and frozen her limbs. There was nothing she could do to prepare for it except not go, which had her turning in circles again. There was no scenario in which leaving Freddy to go alone was a reasonable one.

She had tried to get a steer. She had asked Freddy to describe František to her hoping that would help, but his description – of a square-built, bullet-headed man whose muscles were starting to slacken – could have applied to most of the men she had encountered in Prague. She certainly couldn’t match it to anyone from her past. There had been a core of SS

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