“I like it,” Susanne said, partly to put her at ease and partly because it was true. Plus she knew that rents in Freiburg were expensive and that Frau Lamm didn’t make much money working at Paper Love. For a moment, she wondered why Frau Lamm hadn’t been more ambitious. She certainly had the intelligence to be much more than a salesperson in a small stationery store. But then Susanne reprimanded herself. If Frau Lamm was happy with the life she had, it wasn’t Susanne’s place to judge.

Frau Lamm, who had already opened her mouth, probably to defend her apartment, snapped it shut.

Susanne walked up to the balcony doors and peered outside through a gap in the semi-transparent burgundy curtains. A streetlamp cast a yellow circle of light onto the street below. Somewhere behind it, a church tower with a huge bird’s nest on top was silhouetted against the near-dark sky.

Frau Lamm unfolded her arms, stepped next to her, and looked outside as if trying to see her neighborhood through Susanne’s eyes.

“Hard to believe that we’re in Freiburg,” Susanne said after a while. “This looks like a little village, not a city.”

“That’s what it was about a hundred years ago, and it’s part of what I like about living here. I can take the streetcar and be in the city with all its restaurants and shops within ten minutes, but if I go the other way,” she waved her arm, “I have the river, lakes, and meadows right outside my doorstep. So I kind of have the best of both worlds.”

Susanne suppressed a smile. Apparently, that enthusiastic gesturing wasn’t limited to stationery but extended to all the other things she loved.

“What?” Frau Lamm asked.

“Nothing.”

The doorbell made them both jump.

“Oh shit, I forgot.” Frau Lamm slapped her forehead.

Hot date with the boyfriend? Susanne bit back the words before she could ask. Frau Lamm was an employee, she reminded herself, so her private life was none of her business.

“Be right back.” Frau Lamm hurried past her before Susanne could offer to leave. “Yes?” she said into an intercom in the hallway.

“It’s me,” came the slightly distorted answer. The person didn’t add a name, but the voice was definitely female.

Not a boyfriend, then. Susanne turned and craned her neck, but, of course, there was nothing to see.

“Come on up.” Frau Lamm pressed a buzzer and opened the door.

Seconds later, a knee-high dog rushed into the apartment. The cream-colored mutt looked like a mix of standard poodle and terrier, perhaps with some other breed thrown in somewhere along the line. It greeted Frau Lamm with excited yips, its soaking wet tail going back and forth faster than the windshield wipers had, then bolted across the hardwood floor toward Susanne.

“Gino, no!”

Before Frau Lamm or the woman stepping into the apartment could stop him, Gino jumped.