St. Paul’s was a spectacle of Romanesque architecture, with gentle curves that soared toward the heavens. Stout columns lined the aisle, supporting the rounded arches framing the vast nave. The air inside was cool and smelled faintly of incense and old wood, scents that mingled with the more transient sweetness of lilies from a recent service. Light filtered through the stained glass, casting kaleidoscopic patterns that splashed crimson and cobalt across the pews and onto Zelda, who sat alone with her hands folded in her lap. She didn’t often allow herself to dwell on memories of her father; in a world where she couldn’t afford tears, hardening her heart was an act of self-preservation. But today was different—today marked one year since he’d kissed her on the forehead, and gone to work, and never come home.

She often found the grandeur of the church overwhelming, yet comforting. Despite her father’s skepticism of religious institutions, she couldn’t help but feel drawn to them. Perhaps it was how the figures in the frescoes seemed to watch over her, their faces etched with eternal calm. Or maybe it was the sheer weight of history, the generations of whispered prayers that seemed to linger in the very air, making her own troubles seem smaller.

Lost in thought, she watched a sunbeam’s slow track across the floor. It was a Saturday between masses, the church devoid of its usual foot traffic, a hushed sanctuary far removed from the bustle of Harvard Square. Her contemplation was abruptly broken by the rhythmic clack of leather-soled shoes against marble—an intrusion that shattered the stillness, heralding the arrival of another and more purposeful soul.

Voight paused before the altar, an austere figure framed by opulence. He’d traded his severe black uniform for a gray suit, the tropical weight wool draping him impeccably. In his left hand, he held a fedora, which he treated with almost the same deference as the sacred relic before him. With a deliberate motion, more meditative than performative, he dropped to one knee and crossed himself. Each movement was meticulously precise, laden with the weight of self-flagellation, as if he were a modern-day monk using ritual to scourge unseen, deeply felt sins.

For a few eternal seconds after rising, hand still pressed against his heart, he remained motionless. His gaze lifted, sweeping the vastness of the nave before fixing on her. Each step echoed jarringly as he approached, marking time like a metronome set against her own heart’s furious beat. She remained frozen, her eyes tracing the lines of this new costume, noting how it changed the way he carried himself—less a soldier, more a gentleman, but with a severity that no clothing could conceal.

Without a word, he stopped by her pew, an unspoken invitation hanging in the air. She looked up at him, caught for a moment by the blue intensity of his gaze, so often clouded with concern and focused elsewhere. Here, now, he seemed both entirely out of place and perfectly at home, a contradiction that left her more unsettled than she cared to admit.

He offered his arm, an old-world gesture that felt strangely comforting despite the tumult of emotions it stirred. She stood, facing him, feeling like she was in a dream. And as she placed her hand carefully in the crook of his elbow, the contact felt both forbidden and inevitable, a tangible connection that was hard to define but impossible to ignore. They stepped into the sunlight soon after, the church doors closing behind them with a gentle thud, sealing away the cool of her temporary refuge. Late summer, with its glare and sharp edges, felt like another universe compared to the sanctified atmosphere they’d left behind.

Inside the church, every element was steeped in disciplined order. The rows of pews marched in rigid alignment, each carved backrest and unadorned seat an invitation to suffering rather than solace. Above, the ceilings arched with precise, geometric grace, framing windows that subdued the sunlight into spectral hues. Its grandeur venerated a distant God, enthroned in judgment; in the garden, He was a friend, His presence whispering in every breeze.

All around them, paths curved and wandered, disappearing beneath thickets of flowering shrubs and reemerging by tranquil ponds. Unbound by the meticulous geometry of human design, the air was alive with rustling leaves and chirping birds, a gentle chaos that celebrated life in all its myriad forms. Even the bench under the dogwood tree, worn smooth by countless prior conversations, seemed to have grown organically from the earth, offering a seat not just to rest but to connect with something greater than herself.

A monk in a weathered cassock moved among the rhododendrons and hydrangeas, his movements slow and contemplative as he tended the plants with a trowel and a bag of compost. Every now and then, his eyes flickered towards the interlopers, curiosity veiled thinly by his feigned concentration on the vibrant bursts of flora. Voight sat down and Zelda joined him, admiring the summer’s last blooms. Neither of them spoke, but the silence was a companionable one, a joint sharing of some much needed respite. Summer seemed eternal in this heat, filled with droning bees, but progress marched on inexorably. The seasons had to change, she told herself, for life to continue, but she wasn’t ready to say goodbye to what’d been.

“You must have a lot to confess,” she remarked, catching a dogwood blossom as it twirled down.

Voight’s eyes softened, the hard lines of command easing as he seemed to retreat into some internal contemplation. The usual sharpness in his gaze blurred, just for a second, as he considered her words. “Yes,” he responded, that single word holding volumes.

Suddenly uncomfortable, she flashed him a half-hearted smile. “You know,” she teased, “dressed like that, you might be mistaken for a regular person.”

From his pocket, he withdrew a small oval, presenting it to her with deliberate care. The simplicity of the gesture belied its gravity, as though he were entrusting her with a fragment of himself. “Here.”

She received the warrant disc cautiously, the cold metal gleaming in her palm. This was the official identification for all plainclothes officers within the Reich, a tangible link to the authority he wielded and the isolation it entailed. It felt unexpectedly heavy, the chain he’d detached from some hidden loop dangling down toward the ground. Her fingers traced the Reichsadler, then flipped the medallion over to reveal an inscription: Geheime Staatspolizei, and his serial number underneath. There was no name; to the state he didn’t need one.

“Die struck by the Prussian state mint,” he informed her, the statement carrying mixed pride and resignation.

This silver token could’ve been one of thirty, but to him it represented so much more: a tangible reminder of the life he’d bound himself to—a life of authority, isolation, and the stark realities of his role within an empire that cared nothing for him. It symbolized both the power and the prison of his existence, encapsulating his deep-seated conflicts between duty and desire, control and regret. Except he sat before, her, not as the man who’d arrested her but someone else.

This man was clad in a three-piece suit of an old-fashioned cut, the blue of his tie a shade darker than his eyes, his style underscored by the meticulously handcrafted fedora. For a fleeting, heart-stopping moment, she envisioned a different world—a world where he’d never enlisted, and there’d been no resistance to join. A world simpler, kinder, one where the ideological chasms that divided them might never have existed. She fought the overwhelming impulse to take his hand, to bridge the gap between what was and what might’ve been.

In his gaze, there was a fleeting trace of something unguarded, a silent admission of the burdens he bore alone. The harsh lines that exhaustion had etched into his features seemed to ease, revealing a glimpse of the man who existed beneath the mantle of duty. Yet, this connection, as profound as it was tenuous, underscored the vast distance between their worlds, intensifying her sense of isolation. It was a reminder of the impossible dream that sprouted from seeds of understanding—seeds that could’ve flourished under different circumstances.

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“This is the first time I’ve seen you here,” he observed, changing the subject. He spoke with that upper crust München accent, crisp and almost artificially pure. “But you’re not Catholic, are you?”

The tranquility of the garden around them, punctuated by the occasional snip of the monk’s shears against the lush shrubbery, seemed to invite confessions. “No,” she admitted, relaxing in spite of herself. “It’s a place where I can be alone with my thoughts, but feel connected to something greater. God, though, if there even is a God, doesn’t wait for people inside some special house—and He, or She, doesn’t care if that’s a church or a synagogue.”

Voight made a noncommittal noise. “Whether God cares or not isn’t the issue.”

She hesitated, her gaze dropping to the token in her hand. “My dad is at Mt. Auburn Cemetery,” she began quietly, the worst tasting bitter as she spoke them. “Last summer, we were still civilized enough to be burying each other.” She’d never talked about this before and she shouldn’t start this afternoon, but unburdening herself to Voight felt inexplicably natural. “By the time Oma Jeanette died…leaving the house was too dangerous. And there was no gas,” she added, with a pang of remorse. “We’d used up the last of it, hunting for more of her heart pills.”

“She’s still at the house?” Voight prompted.

“Alex and I….” Her voice dwindled to a murmur, everything she couldn’t bring herself to share stretching before her like the vast, iron-hard ground she’d faced a lifetime ago. “We put her into the neighbor’s koi pond.” She chuckled at the stupidity of it all. “They’d fled, so they didn’t care, and it was too cold to dig. We…improvised, I guess.”

Voight surprised her, then; instead of issuing some cutting remark, he nodded thoughtfully. “You accomplished something extraordinary, Zelda. It was an act of profound respect, a resistance in its own right.” When she didn’t respond, he turned to her, his gaze searching. “Would you be this upset with someone else, for not singlehandedly changing the world?”

A lump rose in her throat.

“Grief often manifests as guilt.” Relaxing, he spread an arm out along the back of the bench. “Maybe it’s not the funeral you’re wrestling with, but a deeper wish that you could’ve done more—saved more.” He turned his head, his eyes on hers. “That’s a lot for one person to carry alone.”

She plucked at the fabric of her skirt, torn between gratitude that someone finally understood and wanting to scream at him that he was part of the problem. “It wasn’t dignified,” she whispered. “I was hip deep in mud, sobbing, with the only mom I’d ever known lying next to me in a tarp. It was sleeting, I was freezing, and Alex started lecturing me about how I needed to be more reverent.”

“This from a man who mistakes harassment for romance.” Voight’s mouth compressed into the flat, sour line she’d come to know so well. “His conscience is a mirror, reflecting only his own dreams and desires. You don’t see what he’s so desperate for you to, and so you’re wrong. But it must be exhausting, for him, living in that one-man echo chamber.”

She caught the hint of pain, underlying his caustic tone. “You sound like you’re speaking from experience.”

The corners of his mouth twitched in a rueful smile. “At my mother’s funeral, my father and I got into a fistfight.”

Processing that statement took a minute. “How did she die?”

“She hung herself,” he replied, the words stark and barren of emotion.

Her heart clenched. “Your father is a horrible man.”

The monk gave them one last, long look before gathering his supplies and disappearing through the gate.

“My father thought his children should be thralls, carbon copies of himself who existed solely to please him.” Voight’s voice was a monotone veneer, carefully shielding the turmoil beneath. “Much like, in Alex’s mind, you exist to confirm his beliefs about the world. Whatever he despised in himself, he sought to annihilate in me, attempting to sculpt me into his ideal. I was malleable enough, being desperate to earn his approval. But my brother, he was like you.” He paused, collecting his thoughts. “Sebastian was good, and kind, what my father called soft, and he refused to become something different.” His gaze drifted to where the monk had been, eyes unfocused, lost in the past. “He was just more defective machinery, even at six, to be fixed…or discarded.”

Her stomach dropped. “Discarded?”

“My father drowned him in a toilet,” Voight said flatly. “I found him when I came home from school.”

She stared, incredulous. “He’s still walking around, free?”

Voight’s scoff was a hollow sound. “His firm is the third largest producer of the Panzer Mark X in the Reich. He’s a monster but, to them, he’s an effective one. The Heer needs its tanks.”

His words hit her like a punch to the gut. His father had murdered his brother, leaving the body for him to find? She stared at him, the contours of his face suddenly seeming softer, less impenetrable. He wasn’t just the caustic, unapproachable figure she’d battled with and bristled against; he was human, painfully so. It made sense, how he understood her guilt, the depth of her grief—because he’d been there, mired in his own, a child who’d seen firsthand that compassion only caused pain. Uncomfortable, she averted her gaze. “Is that why you don’t have children?”

“I don’t have children,” he replied with a weary resignation, “because my wife left me.”

“Your wife?” Zelda repeated, her voice rising in disbelief. “You’re married?”

“No,” he snapped, irritation seeping through his controlled façade. “Listen to me, Anna and I—

She leapt to her feet, rounding on him. “I’m such an idiot! Where is she?”

“Home,” he answered tersely.

“Naturally!” she taunted, her voice dripping with sarcasm. “This explains everything!”

He surged to his feet, every muscle taut with agitation. “This explains nothing!”

She recoiled at his tone, her fingers tightening reflexively around the warrant disc she still clutched. Looking down, she saw the deep groove it’d inscribed into her palm, the Reichsadler emblem a furious red mark that seemed to mock her having dared to trust the lying, two-faced backstabber. With a cry torn from the depths of her shattered resolve, she hurled his trinket at him.

He caught it effortlessly, his expression unreadable. “Will you please shut up?”

“No,” she exploded, her voice cracking with pent-up frustration. “I’m done being everyone’s puppet!” Her breaths came quick and sharp, each one a visible struggle against the turmoil inside. “You’re going to lecture me about being too young again, right? Convenient how I’m only a kid when you need me to shut up and obey. Then, suddenly, I’m expected to handle everything like I’m some ancient relic!” She pointed an accusatory finger at him, her words a singsong mockery. “Make coffee, Zelda, sort these files, eat your damn peas! Like I’m just here to serve you and everyone else, and wanting anything for myself is immature!”

“You’re being ridiculous,” he shot back, his voice sharp.

She lifted her chin, unwilling to back down. “When do I get to make my own choices?” she demanded. “Who I am, what I want, even how I dress—without you dictating everything?”

“You seem quite clear what you want,” he retorted, each word dripping with scorn.

“Go to hell!” she spat.

But instead of responding, his eyes seared into hers, his control held in such a tight grip that it seemed poised to shatter at any moment, unleashing the fury smoldering within.

With a final withering snort, she turned on her heel and stormed off, leaving him alone under the tree.