Maybe it was a mirage, a hallucination. But even if my eyes were deceiving me, my other senses weren’t. I knew that smell. I had known it and loved it my whole life.

I stared at them both, my jaw open.

‘It’s Sachertorte,’ Annie said.

‘I know what it is!’ I said. ‘I just don’t know how you did it. The ingredients are impossible to get! Sugar, butter… real chocolate?!’

‘Remember those shoes you grew out of last month?’ Mama asked.

‘Yes,’ I replied, wondering what shoes had to do with anything.

‘I swapped them for the chocolate!’

‘You what?’ I burst out laughing.

‘And remember I told you I’ve been doing some sewing but I didn’t tell you what it was for?’ Annie asked.

‘Ye-e-e-s?’

‘Well, it was for this,’ she confessed. ‘I was doing it to buy flour and sugar.’

‘I even managed to get the Stewarts in on it,’ Mama went on. ‘They found some almonds in an old tin and gave them to us.’

I stared at them both. ‘But – but I don’t understand. Why did you do all that for me? It’s not my birthday or anything.’

Annie came towards me and slipped an arm around my waist. ‘Not yours,’ she said. ‘Ours. It’s our anniversary today. We’ve been together for a whole year.’

I was too choked up to speak. Instead, I put my arm around her shoulders and beckoned Mama over. Putting my other arm around her, I kissed first Annie’s cheek and then the top of Mama’s head.

‘I can’t believe you’ve done this,’ I whispered to them. ‘Thank you.’

We stayed like that for a minute, each of us only too aware of the people in between us who were missing.

‘Right, come on, then,’ Mama said, pulling away before those thoughts crystalized and ruined the moment. ‘Let’s eat it while it’s warm.’

The three of us sat together at the table and Mama cut us each a big slice.

I closed my eyes as I ate. I had never eaten anything so wonderful in all my life.

Afterwards, as we washed up together, and laughed and played games around the table, and talked until the room grew dark, I felt like the luckiest man alive.

Bowled over by the beautiful thing they had done for me, I couldn’t stop watching the two women in my life.

Mama and Annie.

My heart, my world, my everything.

ELSA

I remember a routine I had, back when I was a child, in a time before Auschwitz, where I had to say one good thing each day.

The memory is like thinking of someone else’s life and it hurts like a kick to the stomach. No. I have got used to those. It is worse. It hurts like the final kick, the one you don’t get back up from.