Opening
At Minka Singer’s funeral, grief, guilt, and desire collide. Leo Stein steps into Sage Singer’s life as protector and partner just as Sage wrestles with Guilt, Sin, and Atonement and the crushing weight of Loss and Grief. What begins as comfort becomes a romance—and then a moral crucible—culminating in a confession, a killing, and a devastating twist.
What Happens
Chapter 16: An Unlikely Couple
From Leo’s point of view, the chapter opens at Minka’s funeral. He finds Sage collapsed in the director’s office, where the director—Adam, Sage’s married ex—is tending to her. The air hums with awkwardness and old wounds. Leo steadies Sage, whose guilt about pushing Minka to relive her past threatens to swallow her. He reassures her that telling the story may have brought Minka peace, and then quietly crosses a line: “Today, I thought maybe I could be your family.” At the shivah, he runs interference with Sage’s sisters, absorbing the social strain so she can breathe.
The room closes in. Leo “kidnaps” Sage and her dog, Eva, to a hotel, where privacy opens into intimacy. Sage pulls out a leather notebook and reads Minka’s postwar fairy tale about a baker’s daughter, Ania, and Aleks, a monstrous soldier. The tale reflects Minka’s reality: power, predation, and a perilous bond. It ends unfinished on a knife-edge—Aleks captured, begging Ania to kill him. The unsparing mood tips into tenderness; Leo kisses Sage’s scars, then her mouth, and she admits the guilt she’s carried since the car crash that killed her mother.
Morning brings the hangover of consequence. Leo, torn between his role and the previous night, calls their intimacy a “mistake.” Sage refuses the label and ends things with Adam for good. Then clarity strikes Leo: with Minka gone, they need a direct confession from Josef Weber. He proposes wiring Sage so she can coax Josef into admitting he murdered a prisoner named Darija. Sage agrees—then teasingly pulls Leo back to bed, blurring personal and professional lines. The chapter closes with a brief, italicized fragment from Ania’s perspective as she poisons a guard to reach Aleks’s cell, a dark echo of Sage’s present.
Chapter 17: An Eye for an Eye
Now in Sage’s voice, the operation takes shape. She’s falling for Leo, who disarms her family and makes her feel safe in ways she never has. Still, nerves prickle as he hides a microphone on her and reviews the plan: Sage will collect Josef from the hospital, bring him home, and guide him toward a confession while Leo listens from a surveillance van. On the drive, Josef casually reveals he knows her grandmother was a Holocaust survivor.
At Josef’s house, Sage steers him gently toward the past. “Tell me the worst thing you ever did,” she asks. Josef describes being caught stealing from his brother Reiner Hartmann’s safe by two female prisoners. He claims he aimed at Minka, but an old arm injury threw his shot, killing the other girl, Darija. He casts Reiner’s report of the unsanctioned killing as betrayal. The confession lands—Leo has what he needs to push for deportation and prison.
Sage doesn’t feel triumphant. Leo’s optimistic talk of the future feels out of step with the moral mess she’s wading through. She visits Mary DeAngelis at the shrine to ask about Forgiveness and Justice. Mary offers clarity: forgiveness is a gift you give yourself, and you cannot forgive a wrong done to someone else. Sage cuts monkshood from the garden and returns to Josef that night. He delivers a second, more chilling confession: after escaping the camps with Reiner, he watches his brother choke to death and does nothing. “The worst of it,” he says flatly, “is that I wish I had done it sooner.” Convinced of his unrepentant evil, Sage gives him a monkshood-laced roll. As he dies, he gasps, “How... does... it end?” She refuses him forgiveness. “Like this,” she answers.
By morning, Leo and a historian colleague, Genevra, arrive to confront Josef. Sage lets them discover the body while she slips into the bedroom. In Leo’s briefcase, she finds an SS file with a fatal discrepancy: Josef’s blood type is B+, but Reiner’s is AB. Josef is not Reiner at all—he is Franz, Reiner’s brother. In the nightstand, a journal confirms it: Franz’s writings, Minka’s original story tucked inside, and his many failed endings. Horror floods Sage—she has killed the “wrong” man, though still a Nazi officer. When Leo asks if she found an address book, Sage lies, hiding the journal and the truth.
Character Development
Sage Singer: Grief-stricken and guilt-haunted, Sage evolves from passive mourner to active arbiter of justice. Love empowers her, but it’s Josef/Franz’s cold malice that hardens her resolve to act.
- She accepts intimacy and care, then asserts moral agency.
- She internalizes Mary’s boundary on forgiveness and refuses to grant it.
- She weaponizes her baker’s craft, then conceals evidence, stepping into secrecy.
Leo Stein: Leo’s compassion and idealism draw him close to Sage but compromise his judgment.
- He protects Sage at the funeral and orchestrates the wire.
- He frames justice in legal terms and celebrates the recorded confession.
- He remains blind to Sage’s turmoil—and to the identity error.
Josef Weber (Franz Hartmann): The mask slips; his Identity and Reinvention unravel.
- He blends lies with truth to control his narrative.
- He confesses an “accidental” killing, then a deliberate omission that is more monstrous.
- His fixation on Minka’s story—and on an ending—betrays a hunger for absolution he never earns.
Themes & Symbols
Themes
- Forgiveness and Justice: Legal justice (Leo’s path) collides with personal and retributive justice (Sage’s choice). Mary’s guidance draws a bright line—no one can forgive on behalf of another—which frees Sage from the false duty of absolution and drives her toward an “eye for an eye” she can live with, if not escape.
- The Nature of Good and Evil: Moral boundaries blur. The protagonist commits premeditated murder; the antagonist, exposed as Franz rather than Reiner, remains a remorseless Nazi who engineers his own narrative. The chapters ask whether evil can be measured, and whether violent redress purifies or corrupts.
- Memory, History, and Storytelling: Stories shape reality. Minka’s fairy tale propels events; Josef/Franz’s false identity manipulates perception; Sage’s final lie creates a new history. Franz’s journal of failed endings shows the futility of rewriting the past to redeem the self.
Symbols
- Minka’s Unfinished Story: The fairy tale mirrors the novel’s power dynamic: a woman with the power of life and death over a monster. Its lack of an ending embodies trauma’s open loop. Franz’s obsession with finishing it underscores his craving for closure and reinvention.
- The Poisoned Bread: Baking signifies life and community; Sage’s monkshood-laced roll subverts that meaning. The bread marks her transformation from healer to executioner and stains her vocation with irrevocable purpose.
Key Quotes
“Today, I thought maybe I could be your family.”
- Leo’s line breaks Sage’s isolation and sets the emotional stakes. It foreshadows the entanglement of comfort and compromise that follows, where intimacy collides with duty.
“It was a mistake.”
- Leo’s attempt to reassert professional boundaries rings hollow. The tension between what he feels and what he believes he should do mirrors the book’s larger conflict between human need and institutional justice.
“Tell me the worst thing you ever did.”
- Sage’s prompt reframes power—she becomes the judge and confessor. The line propels Josef/Franz into self-revelation while making the listener complicit in deciding what counts as “worst.”
“The worst of it is that I wish I had done it sooner.”
- This confession strips away any pretense of accident or remorse. It crystallizes Franz’s moral void and catalyzes Sage’s lethal decision.
“How... does... it end?” / “Like this.”
- Josef/Franz begs for narrative closure, positioning Sage as author and executioner. Her reply completes both Minka’s fairy tale and Franz’s life, asserting a grim authority over story and fate.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
These chapters form the novel’s moral and narrative apex. Sage refuses to outsource judgment to the legal system and claims it for herself, committing an act that is both cathartic and unforgivable. The reveal—that Josef is Franz, not Reiner—recontextualizes every confession and shifts Sage’s vengeance from precise justice to tragic misfire. Her final lie to Leo locks her into a future of secrecy, binding love, law, and memory in a knot that cannot be untied. The result is a stark meditation on what justice costs—and who pays it.