“I thought, maybe it’s me. No mother would behave this way to her own child. So maybe it’s me she wants to hurt. Maybe she never loved me to begin with. That’s what my sisters said, when I was courting you. That you only cared about—about all this.” He nods to the world outside the summerhouse, the estate, the schloss.

The sun has climbed overhead. The greedy glass traps its warmth. How strange to see winter lying all around you in bare, brown sticks, and yet to feel the heat of summer. Elfriede’s skin prickles with perspiration. Gerhard’s expression turns softer, almost plaintive. He steps forward and reaches out to take her by the elbows.

“We must begin again,” he says. “For Johann’s sake.”

Elfriede gazes at this man, this husband, pale and gaunt and sweating, his blond hair thinning along his temples, and some panic takes hold of her chest. Some giant fear, some ache. She’s nursed him devotedly, on her knees before God she has sworn fealty in exchange for her good conscience, and now he stands before her, he’s only asking for something she has already promised him, and what does she feel? Panic. The heat in the summerhouse reminds her of August, reminds her of lying hazily on the chaise longue under the shadow of Gerhard’s giant, straining chest. At the time, she closed her eyes—she was too shy of this daylight that illuminated their intimacy—but she remembers the sound of his grunting, the sharp, rhythmic sway of her breasts, the sweat that dripped on her skin. The roar with which he ended it all, like an African lion pronouncing victory. That’s it, a lion. Except his mane, even then, wasn’t long enough or tawny enough. He’s so pale and crisp, and before she can banish it, she thinks of Wilfred’s ginger hair, his laugh, his heat, his twenty-six freckles she dreamed of kissing.

Elfriede tries to pull back her arms, but his grip is firm.

“I must know, Elfriede. I must know if you still mean what you said three years ago.”

“What did I say?”

“My God, what else? What else? Elfriede, think. I have thought of nothing else.” He squints his eyes and rocks back and forth on his feet. He bows his head and whispers ferociously, “When you told me you didn’t want any more children.”

“Oh! That. I see.”

“You see? Elfriede, you can’t imagine—I have never felt such a blow. You sat on the bed in your dressing gown and looked at me and said this thing. In all my life, I have never taken such a blow as that.”