Sarah pulled on her brown wool cap, resisting the urge to tell him she’d take it off the moment she cleared the door. When her father was a boy, he’d lost his hat, and to teach him a lesson, his father had refused to purchase him another. It pained Sarah now, the thought of her father’s icy ears, and she found it quite endearing, his perpetual concern over the temperature status of her and Benjamin’s ears.

She walked to the sea and saw the scarf first in the tree. Her heart soared as she spotted Milos in his cap, chatting with other fishermen by the white bobbing masts of their trawlers. She burst forward to him like a marathon runner, and he tossed aside his nets and ran toward her just as fast. Their chests met like magnets. His arms welcomed her back in.

“I can’t believe you’re back,” she whispered, over and over, as she gripped his nice shoulders and sucked in his particular scent of fish and sea and man. She caught a glimpse of sky overhead—blue at last. She hadn’t seen blue sky in months. Well, it was spring. Maybe it was the first blue sky. But it was more than that.

Milos set her arm’s length in front of him, and Sarah grew shy as he took her in because she knew how fantasies could embellish things, and she was no model, after all. Perhaps now, back with the reality of her, Milos would feel differently. But his translucent green eyes glimmered—those eyes, those eyes—and inside them was something she could read plainly before he spoke it. “Every thought I had this winter was of you, Sarah mou. Whatever it is now, we will be together.”

They were sentiments that wrapped blankets around her heart, and words she felt too, but she had other words, darker ones, adjacent in her brain. It was the perfect match, she would realize much later: one person who surfs a perpetual wave of sunshine and the other who peeks her head out into this sunshine but then has no choice but to dive back into life’s murky corners.

“Stemma got a letter from Saloniki yesterday,” Sarah told him, a thing that had been plaguing her ever since Rachel relayed the news. “Her whole family is being deported from the ghetto. The Germans say they are sending them to work in Krakow.”

“Poland?” Milos’s face was the same infuriating calm of her mother’s when they’d discussed it the night prior. “Well…maybe Poland won’t be so bad.”

“Maybe,” Sarah whispered. “What if they deport my family to Krakow too?”

“They won’t,” he said, sure as day. “I will protect you. Anyway, we have the Italians. The Italians are wonderful.” As if on cue, a few Italian soldiers marched by, and Milos saluted them.