Opening
At a small-town grief group, reclusive night baker Sage Singer meets Josef Weber, a gentle, solitary regular from her bakery. Their late-night friendship at the ovens turns intimate and then terrifying when Josef confesses he once wore an SS uniform and asks Sage to help him die. The revelation yokes Sage’s private guilt to the weight of history, launching a story that braids present-day investigation, wartime confession, and a dark fairy tale into a single moral crucible.
What Happens
Chapter 1: Helping Hands
At Helping Hands, a grief support group, Sage hides behind her hair and the scar that reshapes the left side of her face. During a session of mementos, she offers her mother’s wedding ring and admits she’s been coming for three years not to heal but to punish herself—staking out the novel’s interrogation of Guilt, Sin, and Atonement. Tension flares between two members until Sage unexpectedly speaks in clear, steady language about loss: "It doesn’t matter what it is that leaves a hole inside you. It just matters that it’s there."
A new member, an elderly German man, sits silent, watching. Sage recognizes him from the bakery. After the meeting he approaches, calls himself Josef Weber, and praises her words. They share an awkward, halting exchange—two private people with invisible burdens—before parting with the start of a fragile connection.
Chapter 2: Our Daily Bread
Sage works nights at the aptly named Our Daily Bread, a bakery tucked beside a Catholic shrine and owned by Mary DeAngelis—a sharp, big-hearted ex-nun who is Sage’s boss and best friend. The shrine’s Catholic pageantry contrasts with Sage’s Jewish family, and baking itself becomes her way back from her father’s death. The accident that killed her mother and left her scar drives her nocturnal schedule and self-exile, tracing the contours of Identity and Reinvention.
Her most closely guarded secret is an affair with Adam, a married funeral director she met when her mother died. Adam won’t leave his wife, his wife suspects anyway, and Sage accepts the shadows because she believes she deserves no more. Mary disapproves—plainly, lovingly—suggesting Sage is drawn to Adam because he hides as much as she does. Just before closing one night, Josef wanders in, and the unlikely friendship that began in the meeting room starts to rise in the warmth of the bakery.
Chapter 3: Secrets and Scars
Josef becomes a late-night fixture, and in the quiet of the empty shop Sage finds herself talking. Sharing pieces of her past feels “less like a wound, more like a poultice,” and the book leans into Memory, History, and Storytelling: the relief and danger of telling and withholding. Sage visits Josef’s home to play chess on an ornate board carved with mythical creatures, a set he says his artistic brother made—game and story blurring into one.
Sage remembers learning that her grandmother, Minka Singer, survived the Holocaust, only to hear Minka insist, "Everything before... well, that happened to a different person." The past hovers, unspeakable and present. Testing Josef’s gentleness, Sage deliberately uncovers her scar. He doesn’t look away. "Maybe now, we will have each other," he tells her, and their bond clicks into place.
Chapter 4: The Confession
Mary confronts Sage after a troubling dream about Adam, urging her to end the affair and listen to a warning she believes is divine. At Helping Hands, Josef finally speaks—and his first words are stark: there is no afterlife, only "Hell... here on earth." His declaration rattles the room and shadows cling to him as he leaves.
Then the bakery becomes a circus. A loaf Sage bakes appears to hold the face of Jesus, and the “Jesus Loaf” draws reporters and pilgrims in a flood of flashbulbs that makes Sage run for cover in a secluded shrine grotto. Josef follows and drops a sentence that detonates Sage’s world: he was a Nazi SS officer. He wants her to help him die as justice. As proof, he shows a photo of himself young and smiling in uniform. The question of what she should do—what anyone can do—lands like a weight she cannot put down.
Chapter 5: A Name and a Number
The narrative begins to braid. A dark fairy tale opens about Ania, a baker’s daughter whose father is murdered by a beast in the woods, a fable of predators and bargains that will mirror the human horrors to come. In the present, Sage tries the police, but Detective Vicks waves her off. She visits Minka, but again her grandmother refuses to speak about the past. Vicks calls back with a referral to the Department of Justice.
There, Leo Stein in the Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Section—the government’s Nazi hunters—fields a crank call about Hitler reincarnated as a goldfish and then picks up Sage’s. A living Nazi who is confessing is almost unheard of. He agrees to run the name “Josef Weber.” The fairy tale returns: a stranger, Aleksander, offers to bake by night for Ania. Back in the present, Josef begins his story and gives Sage the key: his real name is Reiner Hartmann. He describes his boyhood indoctrination and a savage boxing match against his brother that hardens him. Sage slips to a bathroom to call Leo with the new details. Leo confirms Reiner Hartmann’s Nazi Party membership. Sage agrees to keep talking to Josef—pretending to consider his request—so Leo can build a case. The hunt begins.
Character Development
These chapters peel back each character’s mask, pushing private wounds into public action and forcing choices that define who they are becoming.
- Sage: Moves from self-punishment and secrecy toward reluctant responsibility—friend, confessor, investigator. The affair with Adam underscores her belief she deserves the shadows; Josef’s confession forces her into the light.
- Josef/Reiner: Shifts from kindly neighbor to a man with two lives. His gentleness in the bakery collides with his history as an SS officer, and his request for death suggests a complicated, self-authored idea of justice.
- Mary: Serves as a moral counterweight—grounded, faithful, and unafraid to confront. Her skepticism about Josef shows how hard it is to reconcile public virtue with hidden evil.
- Adam: Embodies Sage’s self-sabotage—comforting yet corrosive, intimacy without accountability.
- Minka: The living archive that refuses to open. Her silence is both protection and wound, and it becomes the key Sage must unlock.
- Leo: A jaded professional reignited by a credible lead. He pulls Sage into the legal and historical machinery required to turn confession into consequence.
Themes & Symbols
Across these chapters, Guilt, Sin, and Atonement propels the plot: Sage wears her guilt on her skin, while Josef asks for a punishment he frames as atonement. The book questions who can offer forgiveness, and what justice looks like when crimes are decades old and victims outnumber the living. Through Sage’s grief group and Minka’s silence, Loss and Grief spreads across forms—death, identity, moral certainty.
Our Daily Bread and Mary’s past foreground Identity and Reinvention: a nun becomes a baker, a Nazi becomes a neighbor, and a grieving daughter tries to become someone who can live with herself. Storytelling itself—Reiner’s confession, Minka’s refusal, Ania’s fable—structures truth, memory, and power, anchoring Memory, History, and Storytelling. The book also tests how we judge people who contain contradictions, pressing on The Nature of Good and Evil: can a beloved citizen also be a monster, and what does that mean for the community that loved him?
Symbols concentrate these questions:
- Scars: Sage’s facial scar externalizes private guilt; Minka’s tattoo marks an inescapable historical wound. Both insist the past remains visible.
- Bread and baking: Nurture, ritual, labor, and faith—set against the historical ovens that will shadow the narrative. Baking becomes creation turned reclamation.
- The chess set: Strategy, forethought, and the ethics of outmaneuvering an opponent whose past outpaces the present. Each move matters.
- The “Jesus Loaf”: A false miracle that exposes the human hunger for signs and the unsettling gap between spectacle and moral truth.
Key Quotes
"It doesn’t matter what it is that leaves a hole inside you. It just matters that it’s there." Sage’s words flatten hierarchies of grief, legitimizing different losses and drawing Josef’s attention. The line also betrays her self-knowledge: she speaks to others while confessing her own emptiness.
"Everything before... well, that happened to a different person." Minka’s refusal to narrate her past reveals trauma’s disassociation. It also sets up the novel’s central tension between speaking and silence—whose stories get told, and at what cost.
"Hell... here on earth." Josef’s first statement to the group foreshadows his revelation and reframes the moral landscape. If hell is earthly, justice must be too—and that implicates Sage.
"Maybe now, we will have each other." Josef’s response to Sage revealing her scar binds them through vulnerability. The intimacy of this moment deepens the later betrayal, intensifying Sage’s sense of duty and revulsion.
"Everyone is both of these at once." This assertion about good and evil insists on moral complexity. It challenges simple binaries and prepares the reader to confront a beloved man’s monstrous past.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
These chapters establish the novel’s triple braid: Sage’s present-tense investigation, Reiner’s historical confession, and Ania’s allegory. Josef’s confession is the spark that pulls Sage out of isolation and into a role she never seeks—confessor, detective, judge—while Leo supplies the machinery that could translate story into consequence. By binding a single woman’s private guilt to the Holocaust’s public history, the section argues that the past lives in the present—and that forgiveness, justice, and truth are not abstract ideals but choices ordinary people must make.