Page 49 of The Berlin Sisters
‘Papa!’ Ava exclaimed as her father entered the room, holding two drinks that she presumed were for himself and Heinrich. ‘I went and visited your old friend Otto, at the hospital, and I managed to find him some fruit as you’d requested. I know you said not to visit him until later in the week, but I was able to leave early today so I went straight there. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.’
She smiled sweetly at Heinrich, but he seemed more interested in her father and watching his response.
‘Thank you, Ava, although you would have saved us all some worry if you’d simply told me you were going today.’
‘Sorry, Papa,’ she said, before going to sit beside Heinrich, forcing herself to take his hand. ‘And I’m sorry for any worry I caused you, too. It’s very unusual for me to go anywhere other than home, work and to the grocer’s, as you well know.’
She noticed the way Heinrich was looking at her blouse, and she glanced down to see that she’d missed one of the buttons. Heat rose in her cheeks, and she turned away from him slightly to do it up. But when she turned back, he simply smiled and took her hand again, and all she could do was pray that he didn’t smell another man on her skin, for it was all but impossible for Noah’s aftershave not to have clung to her hair or her clothes.
She looked over at Eliana, who was showing great interest in some of her mother’s knitting she’d left behind the last time she’d been at the apartment. And even though Ava was almost positivethat Eliana didn’t know how to knit, she certainly made it look like she knew what she was doing, her head bent as she avoided having to so much as look at the devil seated so close to her.
‘Speaking of the grocer’s, I hear your cousin Elly here is working there.’
Ava nodded and glanced up at Hanna, wishing she’d known what had already been discussed. But they all knew the story they were to tell, which meant that nothing she said would contradict what her sister or even Eliana herself had already said.
‘That’s right. We all have to help where we can, and I’m told Elly has fitted right in.’
‘Herr Müller, I didn’t know you had a sister in Munich,’ Heinrich said, as he took a sip of his drink. ‘I thought your family were all in Berlin.’
Ava’s eyes flitted to her father, who sat back in his seat, smiling broadly. ‘Most of them are, but one of my sisters went against my family’s wishes and married a man not of their choosing. We saw little of them over the past two decades, but when my sister was killed, I was hardly going to turn away my niece.’
‘It’s been so lovely spending time together,’ Ava said. ‘Although between our work schedules, all of us here are like ships in the night.’
Heinrich nodded, but she shifted uncomfortably as he looked at her father.
‘And you’re well, Herr Müller?’
Ava noticed that Eliana stopped knitting, and that Hanna went stiff in her chair.
‘It’s very kind of you to enquire about my health, but I’m as fit as an ox. Other than a bad cold that very nearly went to my lungs, I feel like a man half my age.’
Ava placed her hand on Heinrich’s knee and smiled at him, hoping she was able to distract him. ‘Heinrich, it would be so lovelyto see your mother and sister. Do you think they’d have time to meet you and I for lunch one day? I’d love to discuss the wedding with them.’
With those words, he finally softened into the seat beside her, as Hanna rose to pour him another drink.
‘Where were you?’ her father asked, his eyes never leaving hers as she shifted uncomfortably before him once Heinrich had left. ‘Were you with him?’
She looked at the floor. There was no point in lying. ‘Yes.’
‘Ava, you’re playing a dangerous game here,’ he said, and she watched as Eliana and Hanna quietly left the room, clearly not wanting to be drawn into whatever argument she would be having with her father. ‘If Heinrich suspects anything, if he finds out, you will have put all of us at risk, do you understand that? For a young man who will discard you as quickly as an unwanted pet as soon as you’re no longer useful to him.’
Ava didn’t need to be told what a precarious position she’d put Eliana in, but she hadn’t known that Heinrich would call on her unannounced like that. Especially when the last time she’d seen him, he’d been preparing to go away for a week or longer – she hadn’t even known he was back in the city.
‘I think you’re wrong about Noah, I think—’
‘You think he would risk his life to save you, if Heinrich discovered your duplicity?’ her father muttered. ‘Because I can answer that for you: he won’t.’
She disagreed, but didn’t dare say her thoughts out aloud to her father, not when he was angry.
‘Whatever he’s asked you to do, whatever you’ve agreed to, Ava, it had better be worth it.’
She stood and watched her father go, downing his drink before slamming it to the table as he passed, leaving her alone in the sitting room. That was when she began to shake, her body trembling violently as she sat down on the sofa that had once been filled by Heinrich, remembering the curious way he’d looked at Eliana, while she imagined what he’d be capable of if he ever figured out who she was.
Whatever Noah had planned, it couldn’t come soon enough.
Later that night, as the air raid siren wailed endlessly, and she lay on a temporary mattress down in the cellar between Hanna and Eliana, the family who’d taken over the Goldmans’ apartment merely inches from them, she couldn’t stop thinking about what had happened earlier that day, what she’d so brazenly done.
Noah had asked her to look for anything in Goebbels’ diary that pointed to a meeting with Hitler, to commit to memory anything that was discussed in her presence or in the diary notes that she typed every day for her boss. She’d been carefully searching for weeks now, for anything that could be of value to Noah, and it was the reason she’d gone to visit him instead of coming straight home that night.
