Elsbeth looked at him long and hard. Everyone in the village knew the optician was in love with Selma—but he didn’t know that everyone knew. He still thought his love for Selma was a truth that could remain hidden, while for years everyone had wondered when he would finally admit what had been obvious for ages.

Elsbeth, however, was not sure if Selma herself was aware of the optician’s love. Elsbeth had been there the one time my mother tried to talk to Selma about her relationship with the optician. Elsbeth had not thought it was a particularly good idea, but she couldn’t talk my mother out of it.

“What do you think, Selma, can you see it working with the optician?” my mother had asked.

“I don’t need to work with him, he’s self-sufficient,” Selma had replied.

“I mean as a companion.”

“He already is that,” Selma had said.

“Say, Astrid, since you know a lot about flowers,” Elsbeth interrupted in the hopes of steering the conversation in another direction, “did you know that buttercups are good for hemorrhoids?”

“No, Selma, I mean as a couple,” my mother had insisted. “I mean have you thought of being a couple with the optician?”

Selma had looked at my mother as if she were a cocker spaniel and said, “But I already had my couple.”

In Elsbeth’s view, Selma had only enough love for one person—it was a very generous amount and it was all for Heinrich. Heinrich was Elsbeth’s older brother. Elsbeth had known Heinrich and Selma as a couple and was quite certain that nothing would follow.

Seated on the optician’s examination chair, Elsbeth could not believe that after so many years she would be the first to learn what everyone already knew.

“You first,” the optician said.

He sat on his desk across from Elsbeth. The compress had become very warm. Elsbeth took a deep breath. “Rudolf cheated on me for a long time,” she said. Rudolf was her dead husband. “And I know this because I read his diaries. All of them.”

It was not clear which Elsbeth thought worse: that her husband had cheated on her or that she had read all his diaries.

“I’ve tried everything I could think of to forget. You lose your memory when you eat bread that you’ve found, did you know that? I tried it, but it didn’t work. Probably because I had lost the bread on purpose beforehand.”

“You can’t decide to find something by accident,” the optician agreed. “Did you ever talk about it with Rudolf?”

Elsbeth zipped up her dress. “Rudolf’s diaries are yellow. Lined notebooks wrapped in a bright warm sunflower shade of yellow.”

“Did you ever talk about it with Rudolf?” the optician asked again.