Chapter 14

Heidi turned three in June, a fact that struck Anna, when she stopped to consider it properly, as almost impossible to reconcile with the child she still half-pictured in her mind — the thin, hollow-eyed toddler who had come off a truck in May of the previous year, undernourished and silent in the guarded way of children who had learned too early that crying rarely brought relief. The girl who woke her on the morning of her birthday, demanding with imperious two-going-on-three-year-old authority that the day’s celebrations begin at once, bore only a passing resemblance to that earlier child, sturdy now and loud and utterly unafraid of a world that had once given her every reason to be otherwise.

Frau Brandt had been baking for two days in preparation, hoarding sugar and flour against the occasion with the same quiet determination she brought to most things that mattered to her, and the small cake that emerged from her oven that afternoon, modest by any prewar standard but a genuine marvel given the year’s continued rationing, drew a gasp of delight from Heidi loud enough to startle the chickens in the yard.

“Three candles,” Frau Brandt announced, setting them carefully into the cake’s modest frosting, “though I confess I had to trade half a jar of my good preserves for them, candles being nearly as scarce this year as sugar was the last. Worth it, I think, to see her face when she blows them out.” She straightened, surveying her work with the satisfied air of a woman who had earned every crumb of the afternoon’s small extravagance. “I did not think, this time last year, that I would live to see this child turn three in anything resembling comfort. I am glad to have been wrong about that, if about little else this war taught me to expect.”

Anna, watching the older woman fuss over the cake’s final arrangement, felt a fresh wave of the gratitude that had become, over the past year, a near-constant undercurrent to her days — gratitude for a woman who had taken in a stranger and her child on the strength of a single letter and had, in the year since, become something closer to family than landlady, closer even, in some ways, than the family Anna had been born into and lost across six years of war.

Larry arrived on the noon train, having pled his case to a sympathetic sergeant for an extra half-day’s leave with an urgency Anna suspected had less to do with military necessity than with a man’s plain unwillingness to miss his almost-daughter’s birthday, and he came bearing a gift wrapped in brown paper and string — a small wooden cart, sized to match the horse Heidi had carried with her since the camp, built, he admitted sheepishly, by his own hand in the evenings after work, with instructions borrowed from a fellow in his unit who’d been a carpenter before the war.

“Wasn’t sure it’d turn out,” he said, watching Heidi tear the paper away with single-minded ferocity. “First thing I’ve built with my own hands since I don’t know when. But I figured a horse ought to have something to pull, and I didn’t much like the idea of buying her something when I could make it instead.”

Heidi’s response left no doubt as to the gift’s reception, the horse installed in its new cart within minutes and paraded around the kitchen table with a seriousness that suggested she considered the arrangement a significant improvement to her household, and Larry watched her with an expression Anna had come to recognize as entirely unguarded, the same look he’d worn on the train platform in October when he first understood that no rule stood between them any longer.

They ate the cake in the garden, the June evening warm enough to permit it, Frau Brandt presiding over the modest feast with the satisfied air of a woman who had earned every crumb of it through weeks of careful hoarding, and it was over the last of the coffee — real coffee, this time, a small luxury Larry had managed to procure through the same channels that had produced Ilse’s gift back in April — that the conversation turned, as it increasingly did that summer, toward the practical business of a future that no longer felt entirely theoretical.