“But leave? Aye, there’s the rub.”

“Don’t you want to leave? To return to Vienna and your amusing life there?”

He sits there smoking, and his refusal to answer is answer enough. Just like her husband, who fell in love with her at a stroke—fell in love, at any rate, with her flaxen hair and celestial eyes, her round and childlike face, her expression of dreamy otherworldliness. Imagined she represented some kind of ideal, and was horrified to discover the reality.

“I’m not what you think,” she says.

“How do you know what I think?”

“Besides, I’m married. I’m married and I have a baby, a son, three years old.”

“I’m afraid I don’t follow you. Haven’t you already told me these facts? Believe me, I know them well. Except the age of your son, bless him. Three years old! He must be a sturdy little man by now.”

“I wouldn’t know,” she says. “They won’t let me see him. I have been living here for two—two years—”

“Oh, my dear girl.”

Mr. Thorpe crushes out his half-finished cigarette on the boulder. Elfriede hides her face and doesn’t see him rise to his feet and cross the carpet of pine needles between them. When he stops at the log and sits beside her, she feels the warmth of his body underneath the wool.

“Don’t they send photographs?” he says. “Your people?”

“Herr Doktor forbids it. He says it will bring about a nervous relapse.”

“Herr Doktor?”

“Herr Doktor Hermann. My analyst. He’s well versed in the latest—the latest methods for disorders—like mine.” Elfriede struggles to keep her composure, to speak rationally through the web of fingers covering her face.

“You’ll forgive me, but Herr Doktor’s methods strike me as a trifle barbaric.”

Elfriede’s so astonished, she lifts her face away from her hands and meets Mr. Thorpe’s plain, large gaze directly. His freckles. His eyes, a startling blue. “But he’s a doctor!” she gasps.

“What does that mean? He’s got a paper of some kind, a degree in some scientific subject, which will probably prove entirely obsolete in a decade or so. Any fool would call that barbaric, to keep a mother away from her child. Not even a photograph!”

“You don’t know. You don’t know.”

“Know about what? Your breakdown, as you call it?”

“I’m unnatural,” she says. “An unnatural mother.”

“Well, what the devil does that mean? You seem natural enough to me.”

“I’m not, believe me.”

By way of reply, Mr. Thorpe fixes her with an expression so compassionate, she has to look away. But looking away is not enough. The compassion remains in the air, on her skin, seeping into her flesh, inescapable. She stares at his shoulder and her heart crashes. Fear, or attraction? Are they perhaps the same thing?