Chapter 7

“Larry,” she answered, and let that be enough too, standing together in the fading light with the garden going dark around them and four months of careful waiting finally, quietly, coming to rest.

He kissed her then, slow and careful, the way he seemed to do most things that mattered to him, one hand still holding hers and the other coming up to rest against the side of her face as though she were something he had waited a long while to be allowed to touch and did not intend to rush now that the waiting had ended. Anna felt the whole of the last four months gather itself into that single, unhurried moment — the forest, the truck, the fever, the letters, the long empty stretch of a summer spent imagining this without daring to name it — and understood, with a clarity that startled her, that she had stopped being afraid of what this might cost her somewhere between the platform and the garden wall, without noticing the fear had gone.

There was nothing hurried in it, nothing that asked more of her than she was ready to give, and she found herself thinking, even as she leaned into it, that this too was of a piece with everything else she had learned about him since May — the blanket brought without being asked, the medic fetched at midnight, the toy left where a child could reach it without anyone claiming credit for the kindness. He had spent four months proving, in a hundred small ways, that he would not take more than she offered, and the kiss, when it finally came, carried that same restraint inside its warmth, patient even now that patience was no longer strictly required.

When they broke apart, he kept his forehead against hers a moment longer, his breath unsteady in a way that pleased her more than she was prepared to admit. “Been wanting to do that since a fever broke in the middle of the night and I stood in a doorway telling myself it was habit.”

“You told yourself a great many things, these past months, that were not entirely true,” Anna said, though there was no accusation in it, only the soft, teasing warmth she had learned, slowly, to let herself feel around him.

“Guess I did.” He laughed, low and a little disbelieving, the sound of a man still catching up to his own good fortune. “Wasn’t lying, exactly. Just leaving out the parts that would’ve gotten us both in trouble to say out loud.”

“And now there is no trouble in saying them.”

“Now there’s no trouble in saying them,” he agreed, and kissed her again, briefer this time, before straightening and looking back toward the house, where a single lamp still burned in Frau Brandt’s window despite the widow’s earlier claim of retiring for the night. “Though I expect we ought to go back in before your landlady decides she needs another look at the garden.”

He stayed through Sunday, as his leave allowed, and the day unfolded with none of the careful formality that had governed every meeting between them before this one — no clipboard, no supervised distance, no watching eyes counting the minutes they spent together and weighing them for impropriety. They walked into town in the morning, Heidi between them holding a hand of each, and Anna found herself absurdly, disproportionately happy at the sight of it, the three of them moving down the narrow street together in a configuration that looked, to any stranger passing, like nothing more remarkable than a family out for a Sunday walk.

“People are looking,” she said, quietly, as they passed the baker’s shop, where two women stood in the doorway watching them with open curiosity.

“Let them look.” Larry didn’t slow his pace, didn’t loosen his grip on Heidi’s small hand. “Nothing improper about a man walking with a woman and her daughter of a Sunday morning. If they’ve got opinions about it, they can keep them to themselves.”