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or not, she couldn’t take the chance. The last thing she wanted, when things seemed finally to be going her way, was to be turned in for destroying Nazi property.
    Instead, she hurried along the stone walkway between her house and the garden, pushed open the front entrance, and slipped inside, leaning against the heavy door to make sure it was latched and locked. In the first-floor hall, she slipped off her shoes and hurried past her grandparents’ bedroom, then took the stairs two at a time. The smell of fried onions filled the house, and she knew that Oma would be in the second-floor kitchen, frying Bratwurst and Spätzle for Mittag Essen, the midday meal. If Christine was going to change and leave again without being pestered to take time for lunch, she had to get in and out without being noticed, because Oma’s self-appointed mission in life was to get people to eat.
    Christine tiptoed down the narrow corridor of the second floor landing, hurrying past the closed doors of the kitchen and front room with her shoulders hunched. She unbuttoned her coat and crept up the next set of stairs, careful to sidestep the squeaky first and third boards. When the kitchen door opened below her, she froze.
    “Christine?” someone called above the sizzle of onions and the crackle of the wood-fired stove.
    “Mutti?” Christine said, her throat suddenly hard. She went down the steps and stopped on the landing, gripping the banister with one hand. “What are you doing here?”
    “I need to talk to you,” Mutti said. “ Bitte, come in here and sit down.”
    Christine moved from the bottom of the stairs, searching her mother’s eyes as she entered the warm kitchen. Mutti closed the door behind her, took the pan from the fire, and set it aside.
    For as long as she lived, the smell of cinnamon and sugar-glazed gingerbread would remind Christine of her mother’s kitchen. The cast iron woodstove dominated one flower-stenciled yellow wall, massive and black next to a pile of split firewood. Kitty-corner to the stove, French doors led out to a balcony on the side of the house, created by using the roof of the woodshed. Opa had built a railing around the balcony, and it was protected between the house and the high wall of the weathered barn next door, the perfect spot for stringing a clothesline and for starting vegetable seeds in the spring. Along the opposite wall of the kitchen, a porcelain sink and high oak cupboards ran beside hinged casement windows covered by eyelet curtains. The push-out windows looked over a stone terrace and fenced backyard, home to brown chickens and a cluster of pear and plum trees. The enclosed area next to the back wall of the house was home to three brown dairy goats and their occasional kids, with an entrance to their indoor shelter, a converted cement-walled room next to Opa and Oma’s sleeping quarters.
    The evening and midday meals, Vesper and Mittag Essen, were eaten in the front room down the hall, but for breakfast, the entire family squeezed around the corner nook in the kitchen, the children on the booth’s cloth-covered seats, the grandparents and parents on the short wooden benches. The scratched, pockmarked table, covered with a green and white oilcloth, had a large drawer in the center that contained mismatched silverware, a glass saltshaker, and a crusty brown loaf of the daily bread. At this cozy corner nook, the morning coffee and warm bread with jam were savored, the dough for noodles and bread kneaded, the garden vegetables cut and sorted, and in the winter, when the kitchen was the warmest room in the house, it was where the family laughed and played games. And today, Christine had the feeling, it would be the place where she learned bad news.
    Trying to slow her hammering heart, she slid into the booth, one hand in the pocket of her coat, fingers gripping Isaac’s stone. Oma had done laundry that morning; the smell of lye soap lingered in the air, and the windows were still moist