The Language Between Us
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Epilogue
Two years later...
The house sat on the northeast corner of six hundred acres of Ohio farmland, a small three-bedroom structure Larry had built with his own hands over the better part of a year, working the framing up in the evenings after the day’s regular farm labor was done, and Anna had come to love its small imperfections — the slightly uneven floor in the kitchen, the window in Heidi’s room that stuck in humid weather — more than she had ever expected to love any structure built by anyone other than the careful, patient work of years.
They had moved in the previous autumn, a modest household of their own carved out from the edge of Walter’s land, close enough that Dorothy’s kitchen remained a five-minute walk away and far enough that Anna had, for the first time since leaving Frau Brandt’s house in Erding, a home entirely her own to shape as she saw fit. She had planted the garden that first spring with a care that bordered on ceremony, marking out the rows with the same exacting attention she’d once brought to a difficult translation, determined that the ground beneath this new house would carry, from its very first season, some living evidence of the two lives she’d woven together to build it.
The arrangement with the farm itself had settled, over those same two years, into something Walter and Larry had worked out between them with the same plain, unfussy practicality that governed most decisions in the Jackson family — a formal co-op, drawn up with a lawyer in town, splitting the profits evenly between father and son while Larry took over the actual running of the operation, the day-to-day decisions of planting and harvest and livestock that Walter, well past sixty now and increasingly troubled by a bad hip, was glad enough to hand off to younger hands. They had taken on two hired men that second spring to manage the added acreage Larry had pushed to bring under cultivation, and Walter, watching his son manage the whole operation with a steady competence that reminded him, he’d admitted once over supper, of the same careful attention Larry had once brought to soldiering, had begun speaking of the day when the farm would pass fully into Larry and Anna’s hands, not as some distant hypothetical but as a plan already quietly taking shape, deed and title to follow in time, once the paperwork caught up to what all of them already understood to be true.
“Won’t be today, and won’t be next year either,” Walter had said, the evening the co-op papers were finally signed, “but this farm’s going to be yours and Anna’s outright, someday, same as it was mine and my father’s before me. Man likes to know the land he’s spent his life on will stay in hands that’ll care for it the way it deserves. I’ve no more worry on that count, watching how you’ve taken to it.”
Ingrid Marie had arrived in the spring, two years almost to the week after the wedding, named in part for Anna’s own mother, gone now more than a decade and buried in a Munich cemetery Anna had not been able to visit before leaving Germany for good, and in part simply because Anna had always loved the name’s sound, its steady, unfussy shape in both languages she called her own. She was a placid baby where Heidi had been a fierce one, content to watch the world from whatever pair of arms held her, though she had inherited, Anna suspected, more of her sister’s stubbornness than had yet fully revealed itself.
Larry had wept, openly and without apology, the first time he held her, a fact Anna suspected he would have denied to anyone but her had the question ever been put to him directly, and had spent the following weeks in a state of quiet, besotted attention that reminded Anna, watching him, of nothing so much as the careful, unhurried patience he’d once shown a feverish two-year-old at a camp gate two years before — the same instinct, she understood, simply turned now toward a daughter who shared his own blood as well as his devotion.
Heidi, nearly six now and taller than most children her age, had taken to her role as elder sister with the same fierce, wholehearted commitment she brought to everything she considered important. The wooden horse — Soldat, still, though the name had softened over the years into something closer to a private joke between Heidi and her father than a matter of serious address — had been retired at last to a shelf in Heidi’s room, set carefully among her other treasured things rather than discarded, a quiet acknowledgment that some part of her no longer needed a toy for the courage it had once provided, now that she had a sister to be brave for instead.
Every morning before school, Heidi took over the early feeding, settling into the kitchen rocker with a bottle of Anna’s own milk, pumped and warmed the evening before, and fed her sister with a careful, unhurried attention that left Anna, watching from the doorway some mornings, unexpectedly moved by the sight of it — her fierce, headstrong daughter transformed, in those quiet half hours, into something gentler than her usual daylight self.
“You do not have to manage the mornings,” Anna told her, more than once, uncertain whether the responsibility asked too much of a girl not yet six. “I am capable of the feeding myself, tired as the nights sometimes leave me.”
“I want to,” Heidi said, with the same absolute confidence she brought to most declarations. “You were up at three with her. I was not. It is only fair that I take the morning, so you can sleep a little longer before the day starts properly.” She said it so plainly, so entirely without any sense that the arrangement was remarkable, that Anna found herself, more than once, blinking back tears at breakfast for reasons she did not fully try to explain to a six-year-old too busy with a bottle to notice.
And each afternoon, the school bus depositing her at the end of the long gravel drive, Heidi ran the whole distance to the house with her satchel bouncing against her back, bypassing her mother, her father, even the offer of an afternoon snack, to find her sister first — scooping Ingrid up with the same fierce, unhesitating love she’d once shown a wooden horse and a staff sergeant with kind eyes, as though nothing in the intervening years had taught her any reason to love more cautiously than she had at three.
“Ingrid missed you,” Anna would tell her, though the baby, too young yet to miss anyone with any real understanding of absence, generally responded to her sister’s arrival with nothing more sophisticated than delighted, wordless shrieking, which seemed, in Heidi’s estimation, evidence enough of the sentiment.
Heidi had also appointed herself, without any adult intervention required, the guardian of Ingrid’s bilingual education, a project she pursued with the same seriousness she brought to every task she considered her own. “Daddy speaks to her in English,” she informed Anna solemnly, one evening that summer, as though laying out a strategy Anna might not otherwise have appreciated the importance of. “So I will speak to her in German. That way she will have both, the same as I have both, and she will not lose the German the way some of the children at school say their own parents have let them lose it.”
The arrangement held, through that summer and into the next, Larry’s easy, unhurried English carrying through the kitchen each morning while Heidi murmured German endearments to her sister with a fluency and tenderness that struck Anna, listening from across the room, as one of the truest gifts she had ever managed to pass on to her elder daughter — not merely a language, but the conviction that a language was worth the trouble of keeping alive, even in a country that offered every easy excuse to let it quietly fade.
“She’ll grow up with more words than either of us started with,” Larry observed one evening, watching Heidi coo something soft and German into the baby’s ear. “Reckon that’s not the worst inheritance a kid could ask for.”