Henry turned to Viola and took her face between his hands and kissed her, sucking her breath inside of him, her fingers all over his flesh, mapping her way to him. They made love on the thin mattress, his long hard body pressed down and in on hers, spreading over her as the shadow from a tree would. Henry was silent and when she cried out he covered her lips with his mouth.

He asked her, after, as they lay there drinking tea, if she would stay and marry Ralf. Or if she would go home to her young man with the flowers. Frankfurt was not a city for her, he whispered. There were no beaches. “As the Germans say, Zu Hause ist es doch am schönsten,” he said with a smile. The late-afternoon sun tunnelled in through the small window. “No place like home,” he said.

Henry told Viola they’d said his wife and daughter would be safe, but only on the condition he go into exile without them. It was the Canadian embassy that had arranged things with Germany. Henry hoped he could one day go to Canada. They were working on this possibility, but it would be years, and his life was in exile now, he knew this. There would be no visits to his father’s grave.

Henry cooked noodles for supper and early the next morning he brought her persimmons and tea. Grey sky filled the window and she imagined she was on the shores of Campobello, the traffic outside the surf breaking on the sand-and-pebble beach. Henry touched the necklace that draped over her collar bones, the tiny silver starfish perched near her shoulder. He straightened it as Viola held up her hand and spread her fingers out. “Did you know the starfish is a symbol for safe travel?” Viola asked.

She thought of Ben and his goats, and his armful of wildflowers for his father on Sundays in July, her father now drooling in a wheelchair, his quivering fingers and small, grateful smile when she took his rough hand in hers, conversation an incomprehensible clamour to him but finding reassurance in this touch — as though Viola was still a little girl and they were sitting on the dock together while he mended his lobster traps.

Viola remembered running on the beach with Ben when the evening sky hung before them in muted or­anges and banners of crimson clouds. A hot afternoon in the boat and the wind snapping the sail with that crack she loved so much. The sun rising on the Bay of Fundy, delicate solar yellows staining the glassy waves on a June morning as salt-spray roses bloomed at the top of the beach. The quiet of dawn, a quiet Viola realized she carried with her wherever she went, a solitude in which she carried Ben and her father. This was Henry’s gift of perspective, a restoration and appreciation of the past which had been so brutally cut away from him.