For those first months, she and Milos just slept side by side, sometimes hugging or touching hands or feet, but not fully conjoining. Sarah thought how interesting it was, how different she felt when her foot touched Milos’s foot versus Benjamin’s. Missing Benjamin always made her sad and sober then, and she would write her little brother long letters to which she hadn’t yet received a response. Milos would watch her rush to the post office and return empty-handed and dejected so he began leaving her notes. He left Sarah notes in her apron, notes in her shoe. He left her notes in the pocket of the dress his mother gifted her, a folksy affair that made Sarah feel perpetually in a Purim costume.

I am so happy.

The red of your hair is my favorite color that exists.

I’m sorry you can’t have all of the people you love at the same time.

It was the last note that did something to her, made Sarah attune outside of herself, to sweet Milos and how her despondence was hurting him. It was fall by then, the air cool and pine-scented, and Milos was out fishing. That evening when he returned, he undressed in the dark and slipped into bed. And this time Sarah turned to him.

From then on, every evening they came together in a symphony. They clung to each other under the gnarled brown blanket with the moon unpeeling little slivers of their limbs for the glimpsing. They were drunk off their love. It was the happiest time of Sarah’s life.

The happiest time of her life came to a swift end in September 1943. Sarah stood in the kitchen of the bake shop where she worked. She was pulling ladokouloura, olive oil cookies, from the oven when her favorite patron, Costas, swept inside, bringing with him a crisp fall gust. He requested his usual baklava, which was the bane of Sarah’s existence to produce. The phyllo dough required inordinate patience. It was prone to tearing and drying and mandated a quick assembly with the local thyme honey.

But Sarah loved serving Costas so she excused him his vice. He was old, in his fifties, and he seemed to be a man who liked to talk and had few people with whom to do it. He reminded Sarah of her father a bit, with his expressive eyebrows, grand mustache, and white hair combed neatly to the side—except Costas was gentler and thus far had found no aspect of Sarah to critique. Well, easy to be gentle when you are not the father, perhaps, Sarah thought. She’d noticed herself becoming wiser since leaving Corfu and longed to present herself to her parents and say, Look Mama, Look Baba, I am a person you would be proud of.