“Yes.”
“Does he apologize without turning his apology into your responsibility?”
Anna thought.
“Yes.”
“Does he treat service workers well?”
“What?”
“You can learn much from how someone treats people they do not need.”
Anna nodded slowly.
“He does.”
“Does he expect marriage to make you smaller?”
“No.”
Clara smiled faintly.
“Then continue learning.”
Anna looked surprised.
“You’re not going to tell me I’m too young?”
“I think you are young.”
“Very.”
“But youth cannot be cured by lectures.”
Anna laughed.
Clara touched her hand.
“Do not confuse love with urgency.”
“If he is worth marrying now, he will likely remain worth marrying after another winter.”
Anna listened.
They waited.
One year.
Daniel remained.
They married.
Thomas cried harder than anyone.
Samuel claimed wind again.
Clara said there was no wind inside the church.
Anna and Daniel built a house near the mill.
The first thing Anna requested was a large pantry.
The second:
“No hidden doors.”
Everybody laughed.
Her first child arrived two years later.
A girl.
Anna named her Clara.
The older Clara objected.
“That child will spend her life explaining which Clara.”
Anna smiled.
“She’ll survive.”
Clara held the baby.
Her enormous arms made the infant look impossibly small.
The child opened her eyes.
Clara whispered:
“You are allowed to be hungry.”
Anna heard.
She understood.
Food anxiety had not disappeared entirely from her.
Even as an adult, she kept more provisions than necessary.
Counted loaves.
Checked pantry shelves.
Sometimes woke frightened after dreaming Thomas was feverish again.
Clara never mocked.
Trauma survives explanations.
Knowing a cabbage came through a tunnel did not erase the months before the tunnel was found.
Healing took repetition.
A stocked pantry.
Again.
A meal tomorrow.
Again.
Nobody angry when food disappeared.
Again.
Safety becomes believable through evidence.
Thomas remarried when Anna was twenty-one.
Ruth Ellison had been widowed for four years and had two boys.
Thomas told Clara first.
“Why me?”
“Because Anna listens to you.”
“Coward.”
“Yes.”
Anna struggled.
She loved Ruth.
That almost made it worse.
Liking another woman felt like betrayal of the mother she barely remembered.
Clara understood the problem before Anna explained it.
One afternoon, Anna sat at Clara’s kitchen table.
“Did loving Samuel make you forget your first husband?”
Clara stopped.
Samuel, outside, could not hear.
Clara answered: