Archive of Our Own

The first moment Walter saw her, his Sabeth, red ponytail swinging above her shoulders, black jeans hugging the curve of her hips, he thought she was Hanna.

The location was banal. They were standing in a queue for the dining room, on a transatlantic liner that Walter should not even have been on. He was scheduled to be in Madrid that day, inspecting turbines at his next job site. But he’d been in a plane crash on the way there—a minor thing, nothing serious; yet the thought of a plane falling from the sky always created panic—and his boss had told him to take a week off and recuperate.

“It’s not necessary,” he’d said. “I’m unhurt.”

But Günter had been insistent. “You could use a break,” he said. “You work too hard. Relax at home. It’ll be good for you.”

Walter’s flat in New York City contained his ex-girlfriend Ivy and therefore promised little in the way of relaxation. He’d been quite clear, he’d thought, that things were over between them. But perhaps he wasn’t saying it correctly, or perhaps she was simply being obstinate. Either way, the prospect of having to cope with her watery eyes and limp professions of romance was uninspiring at best. They’d had a row just before he’d left on this journey. “You can’t say you love me,” she’d spat at him. “So you must hate me, then.”

The truth was that to love or hate her, he’d have to feel anything for her at all. Mostly he found her tiresome. He’d rather be in Madrid, inspecting turbines. And yet somehow, through no fault of his own, he instead found himself on a plane heading back to New York City.

After he landed at Idlewild, he waited for his luggage to arrive, paging through a Life magazine someone had left on a seat. There, sandwiched in between a feature on the new X-13 Vertijet and an article about labor union strikes in Wisconsin, was a full-page advertisement for a transatlantic liner to Europe. Salt air, it promised. Blue skies.

It was odd, he later thought, that one of the most momentous decisions of his life required almost no thought whatsoever. Walter tucked the magazine under his arm, collected his valise, and walked directly to the nearest bank of pay phones. He fed a dime in and dialed the number from the advertisement. The conversation with the agent was short: Did they have a ship to Le Havre, where he had a conference to attend the following week? They did, arriving the day before the event started. Could he get to the dock by 6:00 that evening? Yes, he could. Walter made the reservation on the spot.

He didn’t bother to phone Ivy. He thought he might simply sell the apartment. It would be the easiest thing.

The liner was impressive—a 20,000-ton ship, powered by 8-cylinder Burmeister & Wain diesel engines, as he read in the brochure they’d handed him at the ticket counter. He’d never been on an ocean liner before; he didn’t, as a rule, believe in travel for travel’s sake. Why spend a week crossing the Atlantic when you could spend half a day?

But at its heart, a ship was a machine, and that, at least, was interesting to him. Walter thought he might go and tour the engine room later. But by the time he’d deposited his valise in his cabin, it was the dinner hour. He hadn’t eaten since before he’d boarded the plane to Idlewild, so he made his way to the dining room.

And that’s when he spotted her: Hanna, standing in line for dinner. He froze in his tracks, momentarily stunned. But of course it wasn’t Hanna, couldn’t be Hanna. This girl looked to be barely twenty, and that was the age Hanna had been when Walter had known her. The Hanna of today would be his age. Likely she’d be gray-haired, like him.

But the resemblance was uncanny, and Walter couldn’t help but stare. The girl was with a companion, a dull-faced boy with a wispy mustache. She gestured as she spoke to him, waving her hands expressively through the air. Even her movements were like Hanna’s.

He’d had a friend once who’d theorized that there were only so many physical types in the world, and that once you reached a certain age, you’d seen all of them. He could categorize everyone into one of these types, he said. This one is like Professor Zeiss, tall and blond with close-set eyes. That one resembles his mother, a short, round woman with an apple face. This other one is similar to Henrich, his best friend from secondary school—burly and muscular, with a bulldog’s jowls. Walter had not paid his theory much credence at the time, but perhaps this was what he was now experiencing. He was seeing a Hanna-type before him.

He was drawn to her. Not just because she reminded him of Hanna—perhaps not at all because of that. But she was young, vivacious, animated. Her laugh was charming and made the corners of his mouth twitch upward in spite of himself.

As Walter was explaining to the red-coated maitre d’ that no, he did not have a place card, as he had only purchased his ticket an hour before, the girl appeared at his side. “We have an empty place at our table,” she said, in a German accent that Walter found both familiar and charming. “He can sit with us.”

“Very good, miss,” the maitre d’ said.

The girl led Walter to a small, round table in the far corner of the dining room, where the dull-faced boy was already seated. “I thought you may as well sit with us,” she said, “since you were watching us so closely.” She cocked an eyebrow at him.

Caught out. Though of course he hadn’t been watching them; only her. “You remind me of someone I knew,” he said by way of explanation.

The girl introduced herself as Elisabeth, which Walter could not, somehow, accept.

“Sabeth,” he said, liking the sound of it better. “Shall I call you that?”

She laughed, her face bright and wide and open. “If you like,” she said. “It’s pretty.”

Her dull-faced companion turned out to be an American, attending university at Salzburg. Walter immediately forgot his name.

“Do you travel frequently?” he asked Sabeth, making small talk, something he normally found abhorrent.

“Oh, not really. I’m very boring,” Sabeth said. “You, on the other hand, are a man without a hat, and that’s interesting.”

Walter’s hat had blown over the side of the ship earlier, vexingly enough. He told the story of how a gust of wind had caught it. “I nearly went over the side myself,” he said. “Trying to catch it, like a fool. If the wind blows away one’s hat, the best thing to do is to simply thank the hat for service provided and wish it farewell.”

Sabeth laughed, her eyes shining with delight. “Goodbye, Herr Hat,” she said, making a little salute and attempting to look solemn. The boy she was with finished his drink, his eyes flitting between Walter and Sabeth.

“Wiedersehen,” Walter agreed.

“Ah, but you will not be seeing your hat again, so perhaps tschüss would be more appropriate,” Sabeth said.

“I could never say tschüss to my hat,” Walter told her. “Perhaps it might return to me someday. Hope, they say, springs eternal in the human heart.”

Sabeth laughed like a bell, high and fine. “So it does,” she said. She lifted her glass and drank, the red wine staining her lips. She was more ebullient than Hanna had been, less cynical. The more she talked, the less she reminded Walter of his former lover. But still, the resemblance was there; it was like a ghostly image of Hanna superimposed over this young girl.

“Tell me,” she was saying, “why are you traveling on this ship? Are you sight-seeing? Or are you afraid of flying, perhaps?”

“I am neither,” Walter told her, “though I was in a plane crash recently.”

Her eyes went big and round. “No,” she breathed. “Surely not. An actual crash?”

He told her the story, of how the Super Constellation had lost first one engine, then the second. How the passengers been told that they were circling back to Mexico City and that there was nothing to fear. How when the third and fourth propellers had spun to a stop, there’d been an eerie silence, and he’d known they were in trouble.

“Were you afraid?” Sabeth asked.

Walter almost reflexively said no, because he hadn’t been particularly fearful, even when the last of the engines had stopped. But something in her gaze compelled him to full honesty. “I was worried about being injured,” he said.

“Not killed?” she asked.

He shook his head, sipped from his drink. “No,” he said. “If I were to die, that would be that. I’d wake in the hereafter, or perhaps never wake at all. Injury, on the other hand, is a different matter.”

Sabeth glanced up and down his body. “But you weren’t injured,” she said.

“No,” he agreed. “The actual landing was nothing remarkable, in my opinion.” He told her about how they’d come down without landing gear and skidded across the sand to a hard stop. No serious injuries among the passengers, other than some bumps and bruises. “The worst of it was living on limited rations until the Mexicans let the US Army across the border to fly us out in helicopters.”

“Was it awful?” Sabeth asked, completely rapt with attention. “I can hardly imagine.”

“It wasn’t bad. I played a lot of chess,” he said. “I always have my pocket set with me.”

Sabeth hummed to herself. “I like chess too,” she said. “I wonder if I still would, after four days of it nonstop.” She looked contemplative. “I suppose I can’t blame you for taking a ship after all of that.”

That wasn’t why he’d taken the ship, though. Airplanes were, for the most part, properly functioning machines, and machines held no terror for him. He knew how planes flew; the airflow, the propellers, the ailerons and empennages. He’d taken the ship because he’d wanted something different. A change.

He might have thought it was fate that had pushed him here into Sabeth’s path, if he’d been the type of man to believe in things like fate.

Dinner was tolerably good, as was the Irish coffee Walter had afterward. Sabeth talked about her studies back in New York, and Walter listened, letting her voice wash over him pleasantly. She was an art student—of course, he thought—and was excited when Walter said that he’d been living in Manhattan for a time.

“Oh! Have you been to the Met?” she asked. “They have a Rodin exhibition that I think you’d like.”

He eyed her over his coffee. “I’m not much of an art enthusiast,” he said. And then, because he couldn’t resist, “What makes you think I’d like Rodin?”

Her eyes sparkled. “Well, Rodin is a naturalist. His sculptures are very physical, very workmanlike. They show the truth of the human form. It seems to me that if you’re drawn to any sort of art, that’s the sort you’d like.”

“Because I’m a workman?” he asked, unsettled and stimulated by how accurate her observations were.

“Because you like things that are real,” she said.

Over a second round of post-dinner drinks, the dull-faced university boy, about whom Walter had nearly forgotten, mumbled something about going to find the cigar lounge and got up to leave. “Tschüss,” Walter said as the boy weaved his way to the exit, and Sabeth covered her mouth to hide a giggle. He gave her a conspiratorial smile across the table.

“Cigarette?” he asked, pulling his case out of his breast pocket and offering her one. She accepted, and he lit it for her. “Would you mind if I asked you a somewhat personal question?” he asked, emboldened now that their table belonged only to the two of them.

“Very forward of you,” she said, pursing her lips to let the smoke flow out. “But yes, you may.”

“How old are you?”

Her eyelids lowered briefly, as though this question pleased her. “I turn twenty in two weeks,” she said.

Twenty. She had been born only twenty years before. He thought back to what he might have been doing at that time. With surprise, he realized that that was around the last time he’d seen Hanna.

He hadn’t seen Hanna for twenty—no, twenty and a half—years now. Just Hanna; not his Hanna, never his Hanna. She’d said she wanted love; he’d said he didn’t know what that meant. It’s just a word, he’d said. Meaningless.

Nonetheless, she’d found the situation, and him, tolerable enough. Until one day, she informed him that she was pregnant. That’s how she said it, matter-of-factly, like informing him that dinner was ready to eat: Walter, I’m pregnant. She’d known for some time, she said. Two weeks. She was sure. There could be no doubt.

Walter had considered the thought of fatherhood, examined it as one might examine a schematic. Applied to the framework of his life, it didn’t make sense. The wires didn’t connect. He was about to start a new job that required significant travel. His finances were not in order. And fundamentally he felt that he was not the sort of person who could be a father. It was like a misshapen jacket that would not sit correctly on one’s shoulders.

Of course, he would do the honorable thing if requested. He was no monster. He wouldn’t abandon Hanna or her child. And that’s what he told her, in exactly those words.

“There will be no need to abandon my child,” she told him in reply. She’d have an abortion. He nodded, relieved. “And no need to abandon me, either. You cannot abandon someone who is already gone.”

She packed her things. He made no effort to stop her. That period of his life was coming naturally to an end, as such things usually did. He never stayed with one woman for long. He’d liked Hanna, and he wouldn’t have minded things continuing as they had been; but he let her pack her things and walk out of what had been their shared flat without argument.

He never saw her again.

Sabeth, catching his expression, lifted an eyebrow. “Have I shocked you?” she asked.

Walter shook off the memory. “You’re young to be traveling internationally on your own,” he said. “Unless you’re with—?” He nodded with his head to the broad saloon doors the young man had left through.

Sabeth smiled down at her drink. “No,” she said. “Not really. We met up in New York, and it turned out that we were both traveling to the same place. That’s all. Once we arrive, he’s going to Salzburg and I’m traveling to Rome. I’m doing some sightseeing before returning home.”

“To Germany?” he guessed.

Her smile broadened. “Yes, I’m from Düsseldorf,” she said. “And so are you, if I recognize your accent.”

He was, and so had Hanna been. A tendril of unease slithered into the deep recesses of his brain. The coincidences kept piling up, one on top of each other, dragging Hanna back into his mind after so many years of absence. He didn’t know what it meant.

He smiled back at Sabeth, pushing the faint thread of worry away. It was nothing. An old flame pushing her way intrusively into his mind. He was disciplined, an engineer; he needn’t succumb to this sort of mawkish nostalgia. Not when Sabeth was here, and young, and charming.

“I am,” he said, “though I haven’t been back there for quite some time.”

She cocked her head attractively to one side. “And how old might you be, Herr Düsseldorf?”

“It’s Herr Faber, although I hope you’ll call me Walter,” he said. “Forty-five.” He didn’t consider for an instant lying about his age. He was forty-five years old, and that was how it was, and she could either accept it or not. He was fit enough, even if his hair was going gray. It had once been almost the exact same shade as Sabeth’s. And wouldn’t that have been a sight, he thought, the two of them together with flame-red hair.

She smiled impishly. “Old to be traveling alone internationally,” she said.

It was funny, Walter thought. Sabeth being born in Düsseldorf, almost exactly twenty years ago. She could be—

A ridiculous thought, of course. She could be; but she wasn’t.

“Touché,” he said in response to her bon mot. “And what would a clever girl such as yourself propose that I do about that?”

Her face lit with delight, which rather diminished the impact of her attempt at coquettishness, but which was all the more charming as a result. There was an honesty about her, a lack of pretense.

“You said you’re an engineer, Herr Faber,” she said. “Why don’t you show me around the ship sometime?”

“A mechanical engineer, not a ship’s engineer,” he said. “But I can do my best. And for the love of Christ, call me Walter.”

She pursed her lips into a secretive little smile. “But I think you like being called Herr Faber,” she said.

He did, actually. From her mouth, he did.

After finishing their drinks, they made their way out to the deck of the ship, looking out over the railing to the inky black sea and the broadening V-shaped wake phosphorescing in the moonlight. The wind caught Sabeth’s hair, blowing wispy tendrils loose from her ponytail. Walter moved closer, shielding her from the night breeze. Their hands rested near to each other on the ship’s railing, his broad and scarred from his work, hers small and pale.

They talked there for a while, about everything and nothing. Eventually Sabeth’s companion reappeared, looking a bit worse for wear. Walter offered him a cigarette, which he accepted congenially. Walter shifted closer to Sabeth, closer than propriety strictly permitted. His arm brushed against hers, and she allowed it. The boy glanced at the spot where they touched, but what could he do about it? Nothing.

Eventually the boy finished his cigarette, flicking the glowing ash away into the water below. He suggested they go to the cigar lounge, where he’d heard there might be a piano player.

“No,” Sabeth said dreamily. “I’m enjoying the night air. It’s lovely, don’t you think?”

Walter agreed that it was. The boy looked less convinced. “You’re sure?” he asked. Sabeth nodded, and the boy shrugged helplessly. “Well, I’m going below,” he said, and he gave her a last, longing look before finally giving it up as a bad job and disappearing blessedly below decks.

Sabeth turned to face Walter, leaning back against the railing. She looked lovely and sweet with her red ponytail blowing in the sea breeze. “So, who was it?” she asked.

Walter lifted an eyebrow, pleased that she wanted to prolong their time together. “Who was who?” he asked in return.

“The person I reminded you of,” Sabeth said.

Hanna came into Walter’s mind again, like hearing a discordant note on a piano. For some reason, he was reluctant to tell Sabeth Hanna’s name. “Someone I knew a long time ago,” he said.

“Someone you liked,” Sabeth said.

“Yes,” Walter agreed. “Someone I liked quite a bit. Someone…young and fiery and clever.” He stroked his thumb down the side of her hand where they touched on the railing.

A pink glow touched Sabeth’s cheeks, visible in the moonlight. “And I remind you of her,” she said.

“Oh, yes,” Walter said. “Very much.”

“I think I like that,” Sabeth said with a teasing smile and dark, dark eyes.

They stayed out until the rest of the ship was quiet and the moon was high in the night sky.

“I’m afraid that even a night owl like myself must go to sleep eventually, Herr Faber,” she said, drawing her fingers down the back of his hand as she withdrew from him. “So I think we must say wiedersehen.”

“Ah,” he replied, “so you intend to see me again.”

Her eyes danced. “Of course. You promised me a tour of the ship, remember?”

“So I did,” he agreed. Impulsively, he leaned forward and brushed his lips against her cheek. “I am looking forward to it,” he murmured against her downy skin.

She turned her head so that their lips met, and for a brief, exhilarating moment, he felt her tongue, a quick, gentle swipe against his mouth. And then she pulled back, gave him a little wave, and turned to hurry away to her cabin.

Tomorrow, he thought, feeling more alive than he’d felt in years.

The next day, Walter rose early. He spent most of the morning wandering around the ship, pretending that he wasn’t looking for Sabeth. The cigar lounge, the dining hall, the deserted ballroom, the swimming pool, the fore and aft decks—she was nowhere to be found. Eventually, he gave up, smoking a cigarette morosely in the lounge and cursing himself for being a fool. He’d met the girl only yesterday, and he was far too old for this sort of infatuation. He’d never behaved like this about any woman; he’d thought this sort of thing to be, frankly, beneath him.

He exhaled a lungful of smoke, feeling alternately irritable with and sorry for himself.

And then, well into the afternoon, there was the light touch of a small hand on his shoulder, and it was as though his entire body had been lifted by invisible strings. “And who might that be, disturbing my hard-earned rest?” he asked, unable to keep the smile from his lips.

“Herr Faber,” came her already-familiar voice, “I thought I might find you here.”

She came into view around the corner of his chair. She’d exchanged the jeans of the previous day for an A-line skirt, with a polka-dot blouse that tied over the midriff, exposing the pale skin of her stomach. He averted his eyes, eventually.

“You, on the other hand, were nowhere to be found this morning,” he said.

“Ah,” she said, her eyes lighting up, “so you were looking for me?”

Well, what was the harm in admitting it? “For a while,” he said. “I found our conversation last night enjoyable.”

“As did I,” she said. “But I’m a late sleeper, Herr Faber. If you look for me before midday, you’ll have a very difficult time, I’m afraid.”

He thought, briefly, wildly, of taking her straight back to her bed. Instead, he offered her his cigarette, and she accepted it. Putting her lips exactly where his had just been. Breathing in air he’d just breathed.

He was, of course, being ridiculous.

Sabeth handed his cigarette back, marked with the faint stains of her lipstick. “You’ll show me the engine room, like you said?” she asked.

Walter tilted his head, curious. He stubbed out the cigarette in the gilt ashtray next to his chair. “Now?” he asked.

Sabeth shrugged lightly. “Any time you like. You said you would. You don’t have to—”

“Now is just fine,” he said, rising from his seat. “Come on.”

He led her belowdecks, the steady thrumming getting louder and louder until finally they entered the engine room. His spirits, already high, lifted even further as they emerged into the loud, cacophonous space. He understood engines, understood machines and how they worked. This was where his mind went in idle moments. This was where he preferred to spend his time.

He explained a bit of the workings of the diesel engines to Sabeth. She gamely tried to keep up, though he could tell that her education in maths and engineering was not sufficient for her to really follow. So he took her over to the hull, showing her the massive two-and-a-half-inch rivets holding the steel frame together. The ship’s crew watched them, occasionally calling something out. “Cuidado!” one called. “Dile a tu hija que tenga cuidado!”

Walter paused, like a man suddenly aware of his own shadow.

“What are they saying?” Sabeth asked curiously.

“You don’t speak Spanish?” he asked her.

She shook her head. “Only English, and a little Italian. And German, of course,” she laughed.

“They’re saying to be careful,” he told her. “But don’t worry; we’re in no danger here.”

He showed her the overlapping sheets of the hull. “Put your hand here,” he told her. She tentatively placed her hand flat against the metal, and he covered her hand with his own, pressing down firmly. “Feel that,” he said. “You can feel it?” The metal vibrated beneath their hands, rhythmic and steady.

She nodded, wide-eyed.

“From the engines,” he said. “Now, the entire ocean is behind this sheet of metal, trying to get in. Thousands of pounds of pressure. These rivets are what stop it, and that’s why they have to be so big.” A tremor went through her hand; the small hairs on her arm stood up.

“Does that frighten you?” he asked.

“No,” she breathed. “Not at all.”

He let his hand rest atop hers for longer than he should have, caging her body in with his own. He thought, for the space of a moment, of taking her right there, against the plates of the hull, hiking up her skirt and making her wrap her legs around him.

She didn’t remind him of Hanna at all anymore.

“Do I frighten you?” he asked.

She shook her head. “No, Herr Faber,” she said. “I find you many things, but frightening is not one of them.”

He lifted an eyebrow. His hand still covered hers. They were so close that he could feel the heat of her body. “And what do you find me, Sabeth?”

“Mm,” she hummed, thoughtful. She gave him a fast up-and-down glance, evaluating him. “Clever, although a little too vain about how clever you are. Witty, as well.” Her mouth curved into a small, secretive smile. “Handsome.”

It was warm in the engine room. A bead of sweat formed at her hairline, trickling down her temple. He reached up to smooth it away with his thumb, and she leaned into his touch. “Come,” he said, caressing her skin, “let’s go back. It’s warm down here.”

“I don’t mind,” Sabeth said, but she followed him back up the stairs without complaint.

Above, they had the deck railing to themselves. The other passengers had been chased off by the wind or the chill or the nearness to the dinner hour. Sabeth wrapped her arms around herself and stared at the sunset reflecting onto the water. “It’s so lovely,” she said.

Walter had never understood the attraction of a pretty view or a nice landscape. This, for example: the sun’s light refracted through the atmosphere, then reflected back from the water. It was a simple enough process to understand, and there was nothing magical about it. But he liked looking at Sabeth as she watched the sparkling, azure water. She was experiencing beauty, and though he did not see what she did, he could experience it vicariously through her. It was a strange, elevating sensation.

Sabeth spoke without turning away from the water, bracing her hands against the railing. “I am surprised that your wife did not come with you, Herr Faber,” she said. “If I were your wife, I certainly wouldn’t want to let you travel all alone.”

“As it happens, I am not married,” he said.

Her face flushed pink in the serene light. “Your girlfriend, then,” she said.

He shook his head, sparing barely a thought for clinging Ivy, back in Manhattan. “No girlfriend,” he said. He came closer, so as to lean on the railing himself, his hand next to hers.

“I like your accent,” Sabeth said. “It reminds me of home.”

“Düsseldorf?” he asked.

“Düsseldorf, yes.” She hummed in her now-familiar way. “I wonder if you knew my mother.”

The hair stood up on Walter’s arms. Foreboding swept over him. He thought of turning and walking away, the image powerful and intrusive.

“It’s possible,” he said instead, shaking it off. “Düsseldorf is large, but I suppose stranger things have happened.” He didn’t ask the mother’s name, even though it was the obvious and natural thing to do. He didn’t want to know. He didn’t want Sabeth to say it. He wanted to turn away from this subject, like a plane veering away from a thunderhead.

“Her name is Hanna,” Sabeth said.

Walter thought of watching the propellers stop, one by one, on a Super Constellation wheeling and turning over the sparkling Gulf of Mexico.

“Hanna Landsberg. Did you know her? Oh, you must have known her, I can tell from the look on your face!”

Gliding seamlessly and silently downward to the sea.

Walter took out his cigarette case, pulled one out, lit it. “I knew her,” he said. There must have been another man, after Hanna had left him. The father of this girl. He knew Sabeth’s birthdate—she’d said she turned twenty in two weeks—and he figured backwards from it, doing the maths in his head.

“Were you friends?” Sabeth pressed. “Close?”

“Not close,” Walter said, which was almost true. I don’t know what love means, he’d said. “We had a lot of mutual friends. She married, then?” he asked, casually, as though it meant nothing to him.

“For a while, yes,” Sabeth said. “But she and my father are no longer together. They divorced when I was ten. Joachim Hencke, did you know him as well?”

Coincidence upon coincidence, mounting up until the weight of them threatened to crush him. He and Joachim had been best friends for a time. He’d not known Joachim even had an interest in Hanna. “I did,” he said. He hadn’t spoken to Joachim for twenty years. He exhaled a plume of smoke. “Hanna was a lovely woman. I’m not surprised she had such a lovely daughter.”

“Charmer,” Sabeth said, which was not something Walter had often been accused of. He offered her a drag of his cigarette, and she took it. Christ, Hanna’s daughter. He ran through the numbers again. If Hanna had had the abortion immediately after he’d last seen her, and then struck up with Joachim straight away and got pregnant…yes. The dates worked out. He studied Sabeth’s face; did she have the hint of Joachim’s nose? His pale complexion? He thought she did.

“Would you like to come back to my cabin, Herr Faber-from-Düsseldorf-who-knows-my-mother?” Sabeth laughed. The connection made their age difference starkly obvious, but she didn’t seem to care. “I have an almond liqueur that I wouldn’t mind sharing. It was given to me by a suitor in New York.” Her eyes flashed. She was teasing him.

“A suitor, hm? You must have dozens,” Walter said, playing his part.

She shook her head. “I turn them all down. Most men are boring,” she said. “You’re the first I’ve met in ages who isn’t.”

Maths forgotten, he followed her to her cabin.

Surely, Walter thought, a man must know if he were kissing his own daughter, his own flesh and blood. A man would be able to tell. It would feel wrong, repellent. A violation against nature.

When Sabeth pressed her lips to his, he felt only rising desire, the same that he’d feel for any attractive woman…except that Sabeth was not just any woman. She was more—her youth, her vivacity, the way she matched his wit. She opened her mouth to him, hot breath on his lips, and he kissed her. Licked at her almond-liqueur-flavored lips, pushed his tongue against hers. She made a little noise of delight, and he slid his arms around her, clasping his hands around her waist. She was soft and firm in his grasp. He mapped out the geography of her hips with his hands, as he’d been longing to since the first moment he’d met her.

“This is why you invited me here,” he said.

“Of course,” she said, eyes glinting.

“You don’t even know me,” he said.

She lifted an eyebrow—oh? She studied his face, and then she slid his horn-rimmed glasses from it, setting them down carefully on the bedside table. The rest of the room went blurry around the edges, leaving Sabeth the only thing he could see clearly.

“You are Herr Walter Faber,” she said, touching his face. “You lived in Düsseldorf, and now you live in New York City. You are a mechanical engineer for UNESCO, and you like your job, though you find the travel requirements a bit tedious. You love engines more than people, and you would rather dismantle a car than go to an art museum. What more do I need to know, Herr Faber?”

His lips parted in surprise. “You’ve been paying attention,” he said.

“Of course,” she said. “I like you.”

“I like you too,” he said. “As a matter of fact, I like you more than I like engines.”

He’d meant it to sound flippant, joking, but her eyes widened. Perhaps she’d heard the truth in it. Her lips found his again, and he drew her close, holding her tight in his arms. Where she belonged, he thought, dismayed at how quickly, how disastrously, he was falling.

“When did you decide?” he asked. He leaned in close to mouth at her ear, her neck. She smelled like violets, tasted like skin and salt.

“When you pressed my hand to the ship’s wall and told me I was keeping back the ocean,” she said.

It wasn’t exactly what he’d said. It was better than what he’d said. Hanna had had that same trick of taking his words and twisting them into something cleverer and wittier. But he didn’t want to think about Hanna right now.

Sabeth’s small, clever fingers found his necktie. A line appeared between her eyebrows as she concentrated on her work, pulling free the knot, and then she tugged it loose from his collar and let it slither to the floor. She started on his shirt buttons next, undoing them methodically, one by one. “You won’t be my first, you know,” she said, glancing up to see his face.

Walter’s hands tightened on her hips. Her blatant acknowledgment of what they were about to do was rousing. His cock thickened between his thighs.

“Does that upset you?” she asked, making her way downward.

“No,” he said. “Was it that boy from dinner yesterday? Harding?”

Delight transformed her features. “Hardison,” she said. “I wondered if you even noticed him.”

“I noticed him trying to get you away on your own,” Walter said.

“Back in New York, I let him touch me,” she said. “All over.” She undid the last of his buttons and then pushed his shirt off his shoulders. Without pause, he pulled off his own undershirt, standing bare-chested before her, reveling in her dark, watchful stare. And then he advanced on her, walking her backwards until she was pressed against the bulkhead.

Sabeth trailed her fingers down his biceps, dragging her nails lightly over his forearms. The vibration of the engines thrummed through both of their bodies, rhythmic and steady. He thought of her with that dull-faced boy and found he couldn’t picture it.

He leaned close, touching his lips to her ear. “Did you let him inside you?” he asked.

She shook her head. “No. But there was a boy at Yale. I let him.”

A Yale boy. Yes, that he could see. He imagined it, the two of them in the university quadrangle, holding hands. The boy in a suede car coat, Sabeth in a flowing dress, her red ponytail catching the sunshine. Clandestine meetings in abandoned classrooms. Sabeth’s dress pushed up around her hips, her face flushed and shining, the boy groaning as he thrust into her.

Walter untied Sabeth’s blouse, exposing her simple white bra beneath. It was a serviceable piece of underclothing, designed to be functional rather than to attract, which stirred Walter even more than if it had been lacy lingerie. He cupped her breast through the thin fabric, feeling the weight of it in his palm. “You let him,” he murmured. Her breasts were perfect. Full and firm and beautiful.

Sabeth nodded, leaning her head back against the bulkhead. Walter cupped her other breast as well, sliding his thumbs over her nipples. She bit her lip, her hands resting on his hips.

“You’ll let me,” he said. He kissed her on the mouth, her sweet, sultry mouth. Her hands drifted to his belt buckle; she undid it without looking, and he felt so young. She slipped a hand into his trousers, circled her fingers around his cock, squeezed.

“Maybe,” she said, teasing, even though they were alone, and she was in his arms, and his cock was in her hand.

Walter was not some Yale boy, recently out of short pants. He was a man in his middle age who’d been with his fair share of women and knew how to treat them. “I’ll convince you,” he said, and he pulled her by the hand over to the narrow bed, urged her gently down onto it. She spread her legs invitingly, and his cock throbbed at the blatant display. She clearly thought, from her pose, that he’d descend upon her, lie atop her and take her with his cock.

He would do that. Yes, he certainly would, but first he was going to show her something he guessed her Yale boy had never done. He knelt on the floor between her splayed thighs.

“Faber,” she said with surprise. She had not yet called him Walter—only Herr Faber or sometimes just Faber, which he liked. He pulled her skirt off, tugged at her nylons. “Oh, be careful,” she said.

Of course. A girl traveling on her own likely didn’t have much money with which to replace torn stockings.

“I’ll replace them if they tear,” he said. But he was careful not to tear them, sliding each in turn carefully down her legs, exposing her pale, milky skin. Her underwear came next, a simple pair of white cotton that he tugged off and let fall to the floor. He’d replace those, too. He’d buy her more. He’d take her to Bergdorf-Goodman and buy her a dozen more pairs, outfit her in the latest fashions. Anything she desired.

He was heady with want, dizzy with it.

“Herr Faber,” she gasped, when his mouth found her sensitive inner thigh. “Oh, Faber, you—you can’t—”

He could. He did. He kissed his way up her thigh until he reached her sweet, soft folds. He mouthed at them, teasing at them, giving little kisses, until her sweet little clit emerged like a stolen treasure. He was the first to ever do this for her; he could tell that from the shocked, scandalized noises she was making. He glanced up, and she had her fist half-shoved in her mouth, trying to stifle her sounds. The walls of the ship were thin.

Walter found that he did not particularly care. Let everyone hear her. Let everyone know what he was doing to her. He curled his tongue around her clit, tracing over it, holding her thighs down with his hands to keep her from squirming.

Later, he would remember this as the last moment. The last moment before everything changed.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a dark spot. He turned his head to see, and there it was. High on the inside of her thigh, half-hidden in shadow at the crease of her leg, only visible because her legs were spread so wide. A wine-colored birthmark, about the size of a deutschmark, shaped like a star.

Walter had seen a mark like that before—on his own thigh, in exactly the same spot. His mother, he had been told, had the same mark, and her father before her. Same color, same shape, same spot. All of the coincidences drew together at once to form into a single, monstrous truth.

It was a slap in the face from the universe, a rebuke of his hubris. His maths were incorrect, based on false premises. He’d made the numbers dance to his tune, like puppets on a string, except now those strings had been cut by cold, sharp reality. There had been no abortion. Hanna had had her child. She’d gone to Düsseldorf and married Joachim and had Walter’s child, and now that child was here, being made love to by her own father.

Walter’s chest was tight and hot. He forced air into his lungs, feeling lightheaded.

“Faber,” he heard, as though down a long tunnel. “Herr Faber, are you all right?” Her voice was shaky, and for a moment, he thought that she, too, was aware of what he’d just discovered. But no, of course she had no idea; her voice trembled because he’d brought her to the precipice of pleasure and left her there.

He could tell her. He should. She had the right to know. But she was so beautiful, and his cock was so hard. In the space of an instant, his choice was made. Why not, he thought; why shouldn’t he have her? She was his. His.

It was an awful thought, monstrous. But there was nothing else he could do. He didn’t know anything about being a father, but he knew what it was to be a man, and as a man, he would not turn away.

“Yes,” he said, managing somehow to control his voice. “And you, my darling?”

“Please don’t stop,” she begged. “Please.”

How could he do other than what she asked? He enclosed her pearl gently in his lips. The birthmark was a dark fleck in the corner of his vision, easy to ignore. He flicked his tongue at her, and again, and a third time, pulsing gently against her in a slow, steady rhythm. Her breath hitched, and her hips lifted. Her fists clutched at the bedsheets. “Gott, oh Gott,” she cried, and she bucked her hips, falling apart. “Faber.”

Her orgasm was beautiful. Transcendent. Worth everything, he thought.

He mouthed at her gently until she floated back down from the high, her body limp and damp with sweat. Eventually, he rose, looking down at her. She was red-faced and disheveled, her blouse untied. Her legs were spread wantonly, an invitation.

“Knew you’d be good,” she was murmuring. “Knew it right away. You have a look about you.”

They looked the same.

She had his gray-green eyes. The same spray of freckles across her nose. He’d seen these things before and ignored them. Coincidence, he’d thought.

Walter slid his trousers down his hips. Took off his underwear, his socks, baring himself before her. Sabeth’s eyes traveled over his body. He wondered what she thought of the dusting of gray hair over his chest. He was tall, wiry, lean. His face was handsome enough, he’d been told. Is that what she’d been drawn to?

Or had she somehow known? Had they both somehow known—some perverse version of like calling to like?

“You’re sure?” he asked, a last-ditch effort to save them from catastrophe.

“Shouldn’t I be?” she asked, languorous in her post-orgasmic haze. She trailed her fingers absently down her own breast.

He was so close to telling her.

I’m your—You’re my—

“You’re—” he said, the word slipping out of his mouth before he could stop it. It hung there, his very last chance to turn back. “You’re so young,” he said instead. He was a wretched coward, but his cock throbbed, eager and uncaring.

“Yes,” she hummed. “Does that bother you?”

He shook his head. “No,” he said.

A dreamy smile spread across her face. “I know,” she said. “I think you actually like it.” And then she met his eyes and said, “I like it.”

He was only a man, only a thing of flesh and blood. He got onto the bed, straddling her, his knees bracing her hips. “You like it,” he repeated.

“Mm,” she said, wriggling a little beneath him. Her eyes rested on his cock. “I do. It’s nice to think about, isn’t it? How you’re older and know things. You could teach them to me.”

“You’re teasing,” he said. He lined his cock up at her entrance, pushing the head against her slick folds.

“You like it when I tease you,” she said.

“Yes,” Walter said. She did something with her hips—shifted them—and he slipped inside her, the head of his cock enveloped in warm, wet heat. Her face went slack, and her lips parted. He pushed in further, grunting.

“You’re big,” she said, her eyes wide.

“Bigger than your Yale boy?” Walter asked. She was tight around him, gripping him. His Sabeth. His in all ways now. No going back.

“Yes,” she said. “Much bigger. You’re—you’re going to ruin me for other men, I think.”

The thought of other men riled him, made his blood hot. “Good,” he said, and he thrust into her hard, pushing deep. Her hands flew to his shoulders, gripping onto him as though she were falling from a great height.

Perhaps this was what it was like to be an opium addict, knowing the thing you sought would destroy you and unable to stop chasing it nonetheless. He fucked Sabeth, and she clung to him, crying out his name. Every part of her was perfect. This, he thought, was beauty. This was more than moonlight, than the banality of the sea.

“Sabeth,” he gasped, “for God’s sake.”

She closed her eyes, turned her face upward, as though he were the sun and she were basking in it. “Walter,” she said, and it sounded like Vater.

After, he smoked a cigarette, his fingers idly trailing through her disheveled hair, which was half out of its ponytail holder. His body was sated; his mind less so.

“What will you do next?” he asked. “After the voyage.”

Sabeth hummed contentedly, completely bare. She seemed to be in no hurry to put her clothes back on. “I’m going to Rome,” she said. “I’ll hitchhike to save money.”

“Dangerous,” he said.

The corner of her mouth turned up. “Oh yes,” she said, “some older man might come along and take advantage of me.”

He smoked his cigarette and considered. If they were to part ways at Le Havre in two days’ time when the ship docked, that would be for the best. They obviously couldn’t continue on this way. For one thing, she might discover his secret—his birthmark was not prominent, but it was visible under the right circumstances. He could lie to her about it, play it off as a mere coincidence, but how long could that last? Eventually she’d want him to meet her family, visit her home. Something he could never do.

So parting ways would be for the best. A few more days together on this ship, and then he’d never see her again.

“You really intend to hitchhike?” he asked. “All the way to Rome.”

She turned over on her side to look at him. “Not directly to Rome,” she said. “I want to sightsee along the way. Paris, of course. Then perhaps Marseilles…Nice…I’d like to see Avignon, as well. I have guidebooks.”

“Oh, guidebooks,” he said. “Then I’ve nothing to worry about.”

She flicked at his shoulder playfully. “I’m a grown woman,” she said. “I’m perfectly capable of traveling on my own.” A pause, and then, “You have your conference, anyway. You told me. So you’ll be very preoccupied with that, and you won’t have any time to spend worrying about me.”

He stubbed the cigarette out. He stroked her hair for a while, thinking about saying goodbye at Le Havre. About the strangers whose cars she’d ride in.

“And what if I want to worry about you?” he asked.

“Well, I’m sure I can’t stop you,” she said. She smiled and curled into his side, warm and soft.

It was for the best, he told himself. They’d have two more days together, and he’d make the most of them, and that would be that. Obviously and clearly for the best.

The next day, they barely left the cabin. He made love to her in the morning before breakfast, and again after they returned. He’d not been this eager since he was Sabeth’s age himself.

Late in the afternoon, Sabeth straddled Walter, who laid half-reclined on the bed. He lazily stroked his hands up and down her sides. The Mediterranean air was hot and sticky, and Sabeth’s curls were damp, clinging to her neck. Her perfect, bare breasts trembled with each rise and fall of her hips.

She was tight around him this way, which she said she liked. “Not too big?” he’d murmured when she’d sunk onto his length, biting her lip, clenching her fingers on his shoulders.

“Oh, far too big,” she’d gasped, wriggling her hips, forcing herself down further.

Now she rose up and down like the tide, taking his full length over and over again. He stroked and petted her hot, silk-soft skin, making low noises of pleasure. He was nowhere near his peak; he’d come twice already today, and he was no longer a young man. He could enjoy this as long as he wanted to. As long as Sabeth wanted to keep taking him.

After a while, there was a knock at the door. Sabeth locked eyes with Walter, not even glancing in the direction of the knock. “Elisabeth?” came the reedy, thin voice of Harding, or Hardy, or Harrison. “Would you like to come to dinner?”

Her eyes never left Walter’s. “I’m busy!” she called, rolling her hips, bracing her small, perfect hands on Walter’s chest. He slipped a hand between her thighs, resting the pads of his first two fingers on her wet, swollen clit. She took in a sharp breath, her eyes widening. “You can go away now,” she called again. Walter circled his fingertips in small, tight circles, using the lightest possible touch. The way he’d learned she liked it.

“That wasn’t very nice to your friend,” Walter murmured.

A bead of sweat trickled down her temple, falling onto his blood-hot skin. “You want me to be nice to him?” she asked, never ceasing the slow rhythm of her hips.

“No,” he said. “I don’t.”

She smiled, cat-like, and he thought of marrying her.

Insane, of course. Out of the question. But he kept forgetting that she—that it was not possible. It was easy to forget.

“Come back from wherever you’ve gone, Herr Faber.” Her eyes flashed. “I would like you to fuck me now, please.”

She’d been taking his cock for the better part of an hour. But he knew what she meant, what she wanted. He grabbed for her shoulders, pulled her down onto his chest, and he turned them over, pinning her beneath him. His cock slipped out of her, but as soon as she was properly under him, he pushed it back in. He fit into her perfectly and snugly, like a key slotting into a lock.

“Like this?” he asked.

“Yes, Herr Faber,” she said, and he thrust into her. “Francis never fucked me like this,” she whispered into his ear. Francis was her Yale boy. She’d learned what Walter liked, too; learned that he liked hearing how much better he was than her other lovers. “You’re bigger. Stronger.”

“How did he fuck you?” Walter asked, voice tight. He worked his hips in a steady rhythm, wanting to make this last.

“Gently,” she said dreamily. “Softly. Like he was in love with me.”

“Was he?”

“I don’t actually know,” Sabeth said, meeting his eyes. “He never said.”

“You think that if a man fucks you hard and fast, he doesn’t love you?”

She shifted her hips, making him slide deeper; he grunted, gripped her shoulders tightly. She already bore his bruises, light little fingermarks all over her body. He’d apologized profusely when he’d seen them, and she’d laughed and said she liked it.

“I don’t know,” Sabeth said, sliding her arms around Walter’s neck. “He hasn’t said.”

That night, while Sabeth was sleeping, Walter quietly dressed himself and left the cabin to go have a smoke on the deck. They were nearing Le Havre, and a crossroads. She would depart for Rome, and he would stay behind to give his conference, and he’d write this entire thing off as a fever dream.

He breathed out plumes of smoke into the chill night air. He didn’t want to let her go, but those were the thoughts of an opium addict, and he was stronger than that. He’d been alone before, and he’d enjoyed it. He could enjoy it again.

But his mind was unsettled. He lit a second cigarette from the first one, hoping to calm his nerves, looking out over the moonlit ocean that Sabeth found so beautiful.

After a while, he noticed a presence approaching through the gloom. It was Sabeth’s—former?—friend. “Nice night,” the boy said in his nasally American accent. Walter agreed that it was. He offered the boy a cigarette, figuring that it was the least he could do, having poached away his woman.

They companionably smoked in silence for a while, and then the boy said, “She was never going to stay with me.”

Walter didn’t know what to say to that, so he remained silent. The boy went on, “She’s clever, and I, uh. Honestly, I don’t think I’m smart enough for her.”

It seemed impolite to agree. Walter made a noncommittal noise.

“She likes you, though. You know, it’s weird,” the boy said. “When I first saw you, we were all boarding. You had your hat on, and from the side, I thought you were her brother? Then later it was pretty obvious that you weren’t.”

“I’m a bit old to be her brother,” Walter said.

The boy lifted an eyebrow. “That too,” he said. “Anyway, I don’t mind. Not that it matters—I’m sure we’ll never see each other again. But I just wanted to tell you that, that I don’t mind. She’s a free spirit.”

“She is,” Walter agreed. And then, out of politeness, “Danke schön.”

The boy shrugged. He stuck around long enough to finish his cigarette, flicking it away into the ocean when he was finished. “Be seeing you,” he said, and then he vanished back into the gloom from whence he’d come.

She was a free spirit, as the boy had said. It was for the best, he told himself for the dozenth time.

The lights of Le Havre glowed in the distance. Walter finished his own cigarette and then returned to the cabin, where his Sabeth waited, warm and inviting.

On the final morning of the voyage, Walter stood on the deck as the boat docked, shoving his hands into his pockets with calculated nonchalance. A shipboard romance, nothing more. They would go their separate ways. She’d never know of his monstrous secret; she’d find some boy, a string of boys perhaps, and she’d be happy and free. The best outcome.

He thought of her smile, her laugh. The way she flatly refused to call him “Walter”—an old man’s name, she’d said. The way she’d boldly taken him into her bed, and the way she touched him, eager and possessive.

Yet none of that mattered, because it would never work. There was the glaringly obvious reason, but even apart from that: Sabeth was carefree and bright and filled with joy; Walter was cynical and jaded. She liked art museums; he liked engines. She was a romantic; he was a pragmatist.

Though less, perhaps, of a pragmatist than he’d been when he boarded this ship.

Sabeth appeared then, wearing a light windbreaker and espadrilles and carrying her bag, her ponytail blowing in the breeze. “There you are,” she said. “I’ve been looking for you, Herr Faber.”

“You’ve found me,” he said, and though he’d sworn to himself he wouldn’t touch her again—the addict weaning himself from the drug—she leaned in to him, and he couldn’t help but wrap his arm around her, drawing her close. He lowered his head, burying his nose in her hair.

“Good luck with your conference,” she said. He thought of standing before a hall of engineers in a suit and tie, pointing at a chalkboard full of equations, while Sabeth was hitchhiking through the Italian countryside. His throat went tight. When he failed to respond, Sabeth peered up at him. “Herr Faber?” she asked.

“I’ll go with you,” he said abruptly.

“You’ll what?” she asked, startled.

“We’ll rent a car. We’ll go together to Rome. You won’t have to hitchhike then.”

She laughed, but he only watched her steadily. After a moment, she took a step back from him. “You’re serious,” she said with wonderment. “I can see it on your face.”

He shrugged. “Yes, I suppose I am,” he said.

“What about your conference? I thought you were to present some big new important engineering discovery?”

He was struck again by how closely she’d paid attention to every word he’d spoken that week. Much of it had been only small talk, meant to be spoken and then forgotten just as easily, but she’d tucked each tidbit away for safekeeping. “I’m one of five presenters,” he said. “The other four can handle things without me. And they owe me some time off.” Apart from this enforced week off, he hadn’t taken a vacation in years.

“You’re really serious,” she said again, her eyes wide.

“Yes,” he said. It was foolish. Insane. Unspeakable. But the thought of leaving her behind was, somehow, even worse.

Sabeth broke out into a happy laugh. “Herr Faber,” she said, “you are a very interesting man, and I’m very glad to have met you. Yes, let’s go together.”

It was a strange, heady feeling, being given something he so badly wanted. It swelled inside him like a balloon. “I’m glad to have met you too, my darling,” he said. She tilted her head towards him, leaning in for a kiss, and as he drew her close, he wished his words had been a lie.

The days passed, and the worst of it was that if he’d done the right thing and left her behind at Le Havre, it could have been nothing more than a shipboard romance. She’d have been disappointed for a while, yes, but he felt sure she’d have got over it quickly. She was young, and they’d only been together a few days.

But they traveled together to Paris, visiting the Louvre—where Sabeth looked at paintings and Walter looked at Sabeth—and the Eiffel Tower, which Walter actually found quite interesting. From Paris they drove to Avignon, and then to Marseilles, and then Nice. She slept in his arms, smoked his cigarettes, wore his jacket. She rested her hand high on his thigh as he drove their rented car.

Daughter, he sometimes made himself think, in the way that one might probe at a sore tooth to see if it still ached. But he couldn’t make it stick. It didn’t feel real. Walter Faber, for the first time in his life, was falling in love, and in the way of men falling in love, nothing else seemed important.

Sabeth kissed him, and she didn’t feel like daughter. She felt like his.

One mist-shrouded morning in Genoa, she woke earlier than him, and he found her on the balcony of their little hotel room, drinking a coffee she’d retrieved from the downstairs café.

“You’re up early,” he said, coming to rest his hands on her hips from behind. She still smelled of sleep, and he mouthed at her neck. She smiled, tilted her head to give him a better angle.

“I was thinking,” she said. “You look at me so strangely sometimes, and I don’t know what to make of it.”

“Strangely,” he repeated, his hands stilled at her hips. He placed two fingers on her chin, turned her head to look at him. “You think I look at you strangely?” His heart accelerated.

“Mm-hm,” she said. “You stare. As though you’re studying me. Comparing me with….oh, I don’t know, some other person, or perhaps some version of me in your head. You did it just yesterday, at dinner.”

“You’re beautiful,” Walter said truthfully. “I like looking at you.”

She smiled. “Thank you, Herr Faber,” she said. “But I think it’s more than that.”

His perceptive girl. Not for the first time, he wondered how this was all going to end. He’d bought himself a reprieve by traveling with her on her journey, but it had only delayed the inevitable. At some point there would be a reckoning—he obviously couldn’t go home with her to meet her family. So either he would have to tell her, which seemed unthinkable, or he would have to leave her, which seemed equally unthinkable.

Walter was not in the habit of wishing for things he couldn’t have, but at the moment he wished very deeply that things could simply stay as they were, with he and Sabeth together, and Sabeth carefree and happy.

“There’s nowhere I’d rather be than here,” he told her, which was a truth, though not the truth she sought. Yet she accepted it for the time being, setting her coffee cup down on the little ironwork table and sliding her arms around his shoulders.

“I woke too early,” she murmured into his neck. “Take me back to bed.”

“With pleasure, my darling,” he said, drawing her by the hand.

In Livorno, Sabeth had wanted to see the cisternoni, which they’d done, Walter as usual paying more attention to Sabeth than to the architecture. The day was warm, and the sun was high in the sky. “My guidebook says that there is a beach within walking distance of the city center,” Sabeth told him, pointing it out on the page. A beach, and Sabeth sunbathing on it, seemed an enticing prospect, so Walter told her to lead on.

The beach turned out to be everything the guidebook had promised: a small strip of rocky sand, a creek running down to the water, and plenty of trees to offer seclusion. Walter and Sabeth made their way to the top of a small tufted dune, shaded by a large willow tree. “There’s no one here,” Sabeth said with delight. Walter scanned the surrounding rocks and dunes; Sabeth was right. They were the only people in view.

She unfolded the blanket that she’d rolled up into her rucksack, spreading it out over the ground at the base of the tree. Their vantage point afforded them a view of the sparkling Ligurian Sea, dotted with white sails. “This is lovely,” Sabeth sighed, stretching out on the blanket next to Walter. He watched her, studying her curves, her complexion, the shape of her hands, the shade of her hair. Comparing her with himself, noting all the similarities. He couldn’t stop doing it; some deep-rooted part of himself found it pleasing.

“You’re doing it again,” she said. “Watching me.”

“I like to watch you,” he said.

She folded her arms behind her head, fixing him with her gray-green stare. “Herr Faber,” she said, “what if I wanted to come and see you in New York?”

His heart kicked in his chest. It was the first time she’d brought up future plans—but of course she, too, was aware that they were nearing Rome, and the end of this journey. “I’d like that,” he said. “I’d like that quite a bit.”

“Mm,” she hummed. Her eyes were sharp, fixed on him. “And what if I wanted you to come and see me in Düsseldorf?”

His mind froze completely. He couldn’t visit her in Düsseldorf, not ever, but he could think of no way to say that without revealing more than he wanted to reveal. “I—” he began, then stopped, no more words forthcoming. Eventually, he sat on the blanket next to her, pulling her close. She curled into his side, a familiar warm presence there. “It’s not that I don’t want to,” he said.

She hummed again. “Then what is it?” she asked.

“It’s—hard. To explain.”

“Something to do with Mother, I think,” Sabeth murmured, which made Walter’s heart jolt again. “The look on your face when I mentioned her name. Like you’d seen a ghost. Do you know, I’ve been writing her letters about my trip?”

“Have you,” Walter asked weakly. He hadn’t been aware of that.

“Mm-hm,” Sabeth said. “But I haven’t mentioned you by name. Isn’t that odd? It’s not that I don’t know your name, of course. It just seemed as though perhaps I should leave it off for now. You have some past history, I think?”

He could have simply lied to her. He’d already lied to her by omission. Yet he’d never directly lied to her and somehow the distinction seemed important. He didn’t want to introduce that poison into their relationship.

“Past history is a way of saying it,” Walter said. He left a kiss on the top of her head. “I’m sorry I haven’t told you more. It’s…difficult.”

Sabeth considered that for a time. “You will eventually,” she said. “I can feel it.”

If and when he did, what they had together would burn down into ash. But he didn’t contradict her. He only tugged her even closer, pulling her against his chest, as though by holding her close enough, he could keep her safe from the truth that awaited her.

They sat together for a while, watching the sea and the boats. Walter kissed her forehead, then her ear, moving down to nuzzle her neck.

Sabeth stirred under his ministrations, making soft, pleased sounds in the back of her throat. Her fingers drifted down to his belt buckle. He was half-hard already, but it was a bad idea; they were on a public beach, where anyone could see them.

“Sabeth, darling,” he began, but she put a finger over his mouth.

“I know what you’re going to say,” she said. “It’s too dangerous, and we might be seen. But we won’t be seen, because there are trees here, and there’s nobody around. And for what I want to do…” Her eyes gleamed, gray-green like the ocean. “I won’t even have to take off my clothes.”

Walter made a noise of surprise. He’d spent quite a lot of time between her thighs over the past few weeks, but he hadn’t asked for her to return the favor—hadn’t needed it, and hadn’t wanted to push her into something she wasn’t ready for. But that didn’t mean he hadn’t thought about it. “Here?” he asked, nearly speechless. “Now?”

She nodded, the color high in her cheeks. “You can sit right here against the tree,” she said, meaning the willow with its drooping branches. “No one can see us here. But if you don’t want to—”

He pulled her close, kissed her hard. “I want to,” he said.

He sat with his back against the tree trunk, his legs spread in front of him. Sabeth made him take his trousers all the way off, because she wanted to sprawl between his legs. He acceded to her request, feeling dazed. He’d never done anything like this; Sabeth made him reckless. She wriggled herself into place between his legs, getting into position. “Good?” he asked, managing to hold his voice steady. “Comfortable?”

“Mm-hm,” she murmured. She kissed the tip of his cock, a soft brush of lips that made him shiver. And then she left soft, gentle kisses down the length, mouthing at the taut skin, exploring him. Her little kitten licks brought him to full hardness, and he rested his hand on the back of her head, careful not to push.

“Sabeth,” he groaned. She made a pleased noise and pushed at his thighs, urging him to spread them further apart. He was lost in pleasure, rapt in the sensation of her mouth on his cock.

Her fingers brushed curiously against the skin of his thigh, high up, nearly at the crease, and with a cold-water shock of adrenaline, he knew what she’d found.

“Herr Faber,” she said, “what’s this?” She looked interestedly at the birthmark, tracing the edges. “That’s so very odd; I have one just the same.”

The reckoning was upon him. He had only seconds to decide. If he told her the truth, that would almost certainly be the end of things, right here on this tiny beach in Livorno. If he lied, he could prolong things for a while. Maybe a long while. Probably not forever, but then, nothing lasted forever, did it?

In the end, he simply couldn’t lie to her, even though he knew the cost would be high, too high, more than he could afford.

“I’ve never seen another like it,” she mused. She touched it some more. “It’s exactly like mine. Why didn’t you say, Faber? You must have noticed—”

She stopped, because she’d looked up to see his face. “You did notice,” she said, frowning. “You’re not surprised.”

He shook his head. “No,” he managed to get out.

“But you said nothing. Faber, what does this mean? Why do you look so—”

His world was crashing down like so much shattered glass. “Come here, Sabeth,” he said, pulling her up, bringing her into his lap like a child. “Come.”

“I don’t understand,” she said. Her eyes were wide; he was alarming her.

“I’ll tell you,” he said, his voice hoarse. He touched her hair, trying to memorize the feel of it under his fingers in these last moments. “Sabeth, you said that there must have been some past history between myself and your mother.”

Still frowning, a deep line between her eyebrows, she nodded. “Yes, but what has that got to do with—”

“There was,” he said. “I knew her well. Better than I implied to you, when we spoke of this before.”

Sabeth shook her head again. “I still don’t understand,” she said, but a line appeared between her brows. The truth was taking shape behind her eyes.

“I knew her very well,” Walter repeated. “I knew her intimately.”

Sabeth went very still. Walter continued, “We were together. When she left me, she was pregnant with my child.”

“Faber,” Sabeth whispered.

He pressed on, because he had to get this all out at once. If he stopped, he’d never finish. “She was to abort the baby. I never saw her again, I never heard from her. She said—she said she would do it. She told me—”

His voice caught, and he had to stop. Sabeth’s cheeks were pale, her eyes round and white. “You mean—” she said. Her hand rested on the birthmark, and she snatched it away as though she’d been burned.

“Yes,” Walter said.

Sabeth stood abruptly, scrambling to her feet. She backed away, looking down at him as though he were an insect or a bug, as though trying to decide what sort of creature he was. He felt ridiculous, small, pathetic. He said nothing. What more was there to say?

She wheeled around, turning her back on him, and she stalked away, heading for the beach. He silently watched her go until she was out of sight, obscured by trees, and then he let his head fall down into his hands. His mind was blank, empty. He could do nothing but wait for Sabeth—his Sabeth—to return, or not to return, as she chose.

It was in her hands.

“Faber. Herr Faber.” He opened his eyes—he’d always had the trick of waking instantly from sleep—and saw Sabeth leaning down over him. “You fell asleep.”

After she’d gone, he’d put his trousers back on and laid on his back to wait for her, staring up into the pitiless blue sky. Eventually, sleep had overtaken him. “Yes,” he said, sitting upright. “I’m awake now.”

She knelt at his side, tucking her legs beneath her. She was flushed and pink from walking in the sun, and there was a line between her eyebrows as she studied him. Her eyes traveled over him, cataloguing him head to toe. “I have your eyes,” she said finally. “Your nose.”

“Yes,” he said. “And my hair.”

She touched her hair self-consciously, then let her hand fall away. “When did you know?” she asked.

He closed his eyes. “You must understand,” he said, “that I did not know there was a child. Even when you mentioned Hanna, I thought—just a coincidence. I didn’t know until I saw your mark, and by then…” He lifted his eyes to meet hers. “I was already in love.”

There. It was done. He’d given her his heart, raw and beating, for her to do whatever she liked with. Whatever it was, he’d deserve it.

“You should have told me,” she said.

“Yes,” he agreed.

She wrapped her arms around herself, a tremor visible in her jaw. “You can’t be in love with me,” she said.

He shrugged a shoulder helplessly.

“But I’m your—your—” She couldn’t say it. Her face was taut, and her eyes shimmered with unspilled tears.

“Yes,” he said. It was terrible, monstrous, but God, the incredible relief of it—of having the truth, ugly as it was, exposed in the light.

“Part of me wants to slap you,” she said.

“You can if you like,” he told her. “I deserve it.”

“I thought of leaving,” she said. “Of walking back to the hotel and collecting my things and hitchhiking the rest of the way to Rome.”

He wanted to touch her, to soothe, but he kept his hands to himself. He hadn’t yet earned back the right to touch her, after what he’d done.

“Do you know why I didn’t?” she asked.

He shook his head silently.

“Because I didn’t want to,” she said with a humorless laugh. “That’s it. That’s the entire reason. I didn’t want to leave you. So I came back. How does that make any sense?” A tear streaked down her cheek, and she wiped it away angrily.

“To me, it makes perfect sense,” he said quietly. They were, in this as in so many other things, the same.

Her face crumpled, and to his shock, she climbed into his lap, straddling him, burying her head in his shoulder. He automatically put his arms around her, drawing her close. She sniffled, wetting his skin with her tears. “Herr Faber,” she said, “oh god, what are we going to do?”

His Sabeth, in his arms where she belonged. He could hardly believe it. He stroked her back, soothing her. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know, my darling.”

They walked back to the hotel in silence. Halfway there, Sabeth wordlessly slipped her hand into Walter’s.

As the building came into sight, he made himself say, “I’ll get you your own room, if you like. The cost is trivial.” The words cut like glass coming out of his throat. The thought of going back alone to what had been their room, with Sabeth’s hair still on the pillow, her scent still in the sheets, was intolerable.

She stopped in place on the sidewalk, turning to him. “Do you want that?” she asked, her eyes wide and luminous. His own eyes, looking back at him. He couldn’t imagine how he’d missed it before. “You think we should—separate?”

“I don’t want that,” he said. “But I’ll do it, for you.”

The turning points of one’s life, Walter thought, often occurred in the most banal locations. A cheap student flat in Düsseldorf. The queue for the dining room on a transatlantic liner. A nondescript residential street in Livorno.

Sabeth chewed her lip, lost in thought. And then she lifted her chin, mouth set in a line. “The same room, I think,” she said. “What a—” Her voice broke. “What a waste of money it would be otherwise.” She slipped her hand back into his, and he gripped her so tightly, too tightly, his jaw trembling.

“You’re sure,” he said, a hoarse rasp all he could manage.

She nodded, and a tear slipped down her cheek. He brushed it away with his thumb, sliding his hand down to cradle her cheek. “I’m quite sure, Herr Faber,” she said, and she kissed him.

In their room, she undressed him carefully and reverently. Her fingertips traced over his collarbones, scratched lightly through his dusting of chest hair. She rested her palms on his hips, taking the measure of him.

He listened to the sound of her breathing, counting the rhythm, one and a quarter of her breaths to every one of his. The distant sound of traffic from the city center floated through the window. She unbuckled his belt, undid the fastenings of his trousers, helped him to step out of them, and when he was completely bare, she knelt before him.

The moment was silent, sacramental. Her hair was loose around her shoulders, and her hands were braced on his thighs. She looked at his birthmark—at the mark they shared—and she pressed her lips to it in a soft, reverent kiss.

Now there were two of his breaths to each one of hers. His chest rose and fell, and his cock lengthened. An obscene thing, hanging there before a vision of beauty. “Sabeth,” he said, unable to stand it. “Sabeth, I—”

She gazed up at him from where she knelt. “It’s all right,” she said. And then she took his cock into her mouth, sliding her soft lips over the taut, swollen head. Walter gasped. Her mouth was hot and wet and so, so sweet.

As he stiffened, his cock filling out to his full length, she struggled to take him. Her eyes watered, and her fingers flexed and clenched at the muscles of his thighs. He pushed her gently away, memorizing the look of her teary-eyed, flushed face. “I’m close, my darling,” he said. “I want to be inside you.”

“Yes,” she said, breathless. She wriggled out of her skirt, slid her underthings off, climbed onto the bed. She positioned herself exactly as she had on their first night together, legs parted in invitation for him. Beautiful and perfect.

“You’re sure,” he asked, even as he climbed atop her, lining himself up. “You’re sure you still—”

She put her thumb over his mouth to silence him. With clear, steady eyes, she said, “I know who you are. And I want you.”

Calm settled over him, his guilt and fear subsiding. Now there was only Sabeth, bare beneath him, fully and completely his. It felt good. It felt right.

“Don’t make me wait, Herr Faber,” she said. He pushed in, and both of them made the same noise of pleasure together. She was tight around him, squeezing him, squirming on his cock. This was his now; he was permitted to have this. He groaned, thrusting into her, reveling in the way she clutched at his back.

“I won’t last long,” he gritted. “I’m close.”

“Go on, then,” she pleaded, digging her fingertips into his taut muscles. “Do it. Fill me. I want it, please.”

“Say you’re mine,” he groaned, pleasure rising in him like a storm tide. “Please. God, say it, darling.”

“Yes,” she said, doing her trick of locking her legs around him to hold him inside. “Of course I’m yours, only yours.”

“Sabeth,” he moaned, giving her all of himself, giving her everything.

After, as he lay sated and exhausted on their shared bed, she rose up onto one elbow to look down at him. “I love you too, of course,” she said.

“I didn’t know,” Walter said, something deep within him curling up with satisfaction. Perhaps this was what joy felt like.

“I’d have thought it was obvious,” Sabeth said. She hummed to herself. “You have a flat in America, don’t you?”

“Selling it,” Walter said, thinking only briefly of Ivy. “But I can buy another. Why?”

She left a soft kiss on his shoulder. “I was thinking a lot earlier, when I was walking and you were sleeping. Mother is very busy with her work in Düsseldorf. She barely ever takes a holiday, and she’d never come all the way to America.”

Hope stirred in Walter’s chest, the faint flutterings of a future he’d thought impossible.

“You’d want that?” he asked. “To live in America, with me, far from everyone you know? I won’t even be there all the time. I travel for my work.”

She pressed a kiss to his lips. “All the better,” she said. “I’ll explore on my own. And I don’t mind being far from Germany. I never thought I’d stay there permanently anyway. I want to see the world.”

He absorbed this. “And it doesn’t bother you,” he said finally, “that—that we—” He had to bring it up. Had to give her every chance to say no.

The line appeared between her eyebrows again. “It’s strange,” she said. “Of course it bothered me. It was shocking, and you’d kept it secret from me. The thought that you knew and didn’t tell me—that’s what made me nearly leave.”

“A fair complaint,” he murmured.

“But I simply couldn’t leave,” she said. “Not like that. And then I came back and looked at you sleeping, and you were just—Faber. The same Faber I’d been with since the ship. The same Faber I fell in love with.”

He traced his thumb down her cheek.

“You were no different,” she said. “And I found that I simply didn’t care. I suppose that’s terrible of me.”

He smiled wryly. “Then we’re terrible together, darling.”

She hummed in her familiar way, looking thoughtful. “I wonder if there was something about you that…oh, I don’t know.”

“Like attracting like,” he said. “I had the same thought.”

She burrowed into his side, nuzzling at his neck. “It’s insane, of course,” she said. “To even think that. Yet, here we are.”

“Here we are,” he agreed.

“You’re not to keep secrets from me again,” she said.

“No,” he said. “I had a bad enough time keeping this one. You have my word.”

She relaxed against him, accepting this, and he thought about fate, and coincidence, and everything that had led him here, to this moment. An engine fault in a Super Constellation; a Life magazine in an airport baggage claim; a conference that had, at the last minute, been moved to Le Havre.

He still didn’t believe in fate, or destiny. But perhaps he believed, a bit, in luck.

“Do you still want to go to Rome?” he asked.

“Of course,” she said, sounding half-indignant. “I want to see the fountains, the Colosseum, the Pantheon. We can see the aqueducts too; you’ll like that, as it involves engineering.”

He smiled, playing with her hair.

“And then we’ll go back to our hotel, and you’ll make love to me as often as I demand.”

“Will I now,” he said.

“You will,” she said, nipping at his chest.

“I find no fault with your plan, my darling,” he said. The thought crossed his mind—perhaps in Rome he could see about a marriage license—but he’d been given gifts enough for one day, and there was no need to be greedy.

He’d mail a letter to his solicitor in New York tomorrow, tell him to start looking for a new apartment. One with a good view, and preferably a balcony, on which Sabeth could have her coffee in the mornings. And a large bed, on which he would have Sabeth.

He was, perhaps, a monster. But Sabeth loved him all the same, and therefore, the rest hardly mattered.