She climbs a step stool to retrieve the woolen coats and hats to be traded out with the lighter things in the front closet. Then she tidies up the music room, what might have been a child’s room, though she and Aron don’t talk about that. The one time she got pregnant here—not far along; she didn’t even suspect until the spotting began—her body just couldn’t hold on to it. She let herself bleed out, crouched over the toilet, her head pressed against the cool metal of the towel rack, silent and still as if she were yet in hiding, overcome once again by the scent of rust and rot.

She knew then that she couldn’t bear another child—where would the necessary light come from, after the burials beneath hay, snow, rabbit, rubble?—and so with discretion she avoided Aron on her most fertile days, and they played aunt and uncle to Chana and Hershel’s four children. The curve of the children’s cheeks, the pudge of their arms, the translucence of their fingers, it all stung, and it was only after the youngest surpassed five—Shira’s age in the barn—that Róża could wholly embrace them, despite the regular Friday night dinners and birthday celebrations. With her own birthday just two days apart from Shira’s, family picnics on the Narew River stirred within her: how Shira covered her eyes and fidgeted with anticipation, waiting for the cello song to start, then exclaiming over her grandmother’s cakes, frosted like jeweled castles, each year more beautiful than the last.

Sometimes, visualizing her girl’s luminous face, or poring over her old photograph, now framed atop her bureau, Róża thinks maybe beauty can save the world. But then something cuts in. The liquid brown of a girl’s eyes at the grocery counter, or a snippet of music—a violin solo on the radio—shakes her to her fault lines. A long-buried memory ambushes her. She’d turned crazy with anguish immediately after Shira was taken from the barn. When Henryk and Krystyna stepped inside, she fell into Krystyna’s arms, crying. Her girl was gone from her. Gone from all of them—

For dinner, she makes meat loaf and wedge salad. That’s what’s featured in the magazines here. Later, she’ll walk with Aron to the nearest Italian bakery, where they’ll share a cannoli, taking smaller and smaller bites, in turn, until it’s gone.

Emerging from a past life means embracing new things, steering away from reminders. Not scanning the faces of passersby on walks; not returning to the library, again, to search the records; not rummaging through the bottom of a trunk to feel for a tattered shred of blanket, an old watch and compass, a small card with an address printed on it.