“A prisoner,” Marianne said brusquely. “Someone the Americans sent.” Her tone forbade more questions. A German. But Benita had already recognized this.

When he reentered the room, head slightly bowed and eyes averted, Benita felt a wave of shame. He was a good-looking man, too thin for his large frame, with a bold, strong-featured face and a square forehead. He seemed to understand her embarrassment. It confirmed that she was right to feel self-conscious. Sickness and the war had made her ugly and broken-down.

But when he lifted her—easily, as if she were an armload of feather ticking—she felt unaccustomedly feminine. The gingerness of his touch, the careful placement of his hand so that it would not brush against her breast, the heat of his forearm under her thighs brought something dormant in her to life. As her light, hot head bounced against his shoulder, she was filled with a sense of relief. His manner projected competence. In his arms she felt like a baby picked up and collected by its mother, purring with the pleasure of being held. To her embarrassment, her eyes filled with tears.

“Are you all right?” he asked as he navigated the curving stone stairs, and she nodded, unable to speak.

Outside, he laid her on a straw mattress underneath the chestnut tree. The sun was beautiful and dappled, and the breeze brushed across her cheek like a breath, lifting her shorn hair from her scalp. She was not chilled and aching or struggling for breath, and she was filled with wonder at her own painlessness.

“Is this a good place?” the man asked, bringing her back to the moment.

“Thank you,” she managed to say, nodding.

His eyes glanced up at hers then—shockingly blue, like one of those eerie northern dogs, light rather than the deepwater blue of Connie’s. And something like recognition, only sharper, passed between them.

Why are you here? she wanted to ask, but then Martin came running—her sweet, lovely boy, his cheeks pink from play, his forehead sweaty. He crouched before her and she lifted a hand to his face, the beautiful child she had lost and found. And she forgot all about the man who had just carried her down.

For the next few weeks, Herr Muller helped Benita downstairs every time he came to the castle—first carrying her and then, as her strength returned, supporting her as she walked. He was not a talker, but she questioned him anyway. He was from Braunschweig, a city not far from where she had grown up, which perhaps explained his familiarity. Before the war he had been a carpenter. He had a daughter and a father still living in the home he had left.

And your wife? she asked, knowing she was being forward.

His wife was dead.

Mostly they proceeded in silence, which Benita did not feel pressured to fill. She found his quiet steadiness comforting. He reminded her of the men of Frühlinghausen, men who worked with their hands and ate dinner in silence. Men like her father, a quiet hulking presence in her childhood, falling asleep in his chair after dinner with his red hands splayed like slabs of meat on his knees. She had spent her girlhood scheming to escape such men, but now, in Herr Muller’s presence, she found she missed the way they made her feel.