Susi didn’t know what to do. She started to get up, then thought better of it. She wanted to explain, officially, to give Frau Hofmann an account of all that had happened, what the doctor had said, Frau Rüdiger, the milk, the bicycle ride, everything, but it was as if she’d been bound in place like Werner Forssmann’s nurse. Everything was so odd. She was here in this house she’d pictured endlessly in her imagination, here among all the things it contained, the family pictures, the ancestral china, the carpet he walked on in his slippered feet, but this wasn’t where she belonged and it was dark beyond the windows, and her boss, the most proper man in the world, the man she esteemed more than any other, was responding to his wife’s embrace with mounting passion, his arms clutched to her shoulders and his mouth pressed tight to hers in a deep erotic kiss . . .

“Albert, Albert,” the wife murmured, coming up for air, “what have you done to yourself? What were you thinking?”

He didn’t say a word, just tightened his grip on her and tried to kiss her again, but she pulled away and for the first time seemed aware that they weren’t alone in the room, throwing a quizzical glance in Susi’s direction before turning back to him—to his kiss. “You gave us such a fright,” she whispered, and then she was repeating his name again, over and over, as if to take possession of it.

“The children—?” he began, but couldn’t finish the question.

“I left them with Mother because I didn’t know . . . I thought—Oh, Albert, I was frantic, frantic. Don’t you ever do anything like this again, hear me?”

For answer, he pulled her back down to him.

The room went deep then, enclosed, narrowing, a submarine plunging into the depths where only the two of them could go, and Susi, without a word, laid the book aside, pushed herself up from the chair and tiptoed out of the room.

She found her bike propped against the tree where she’d left it. It was chilly out now, but the crickets sang their night song and the frogs, awakened after a long winter’s sleep, joined in. She was out in the country, on her own, and it must have been past ten at night. Her mother would be furious. She swung a leg over the crossbar of her bike, pushed off and began pedaling down the dark driveway to the darker road, and there was no moon in the sky to guide her, only the pale distant luminescence of the stars God had put in the heavens to mark His boundaries.