The summer house is my mother's, and for two weeks it is mine: the reed roof, the sandy path to the Baltic, the fridge with nothing in it but white wine and a lemon. I am Luise, twenty-four, and I have taken this fortnight to finish my thesis and to be, for once, entirely alone.
On the third evening a car pulls into the drive that I know by the sound of its engine.
Robert. My stepfather since I was fourteen. He stands on the step with a bag and a face that hasn't decided how to explain itself, and I stand in the doorway in the shirt I sleep in, and for a moment neither of us says the obvious thing, which is that my mother doesn't know he's here.
“I thought the house was empty,” he says.
“It isn't.”
“No.” He doesn't leave. He doesn't come in either. The August heat sits between us on the step, and the cicadas are the only ones talking. He is forty-nine, greying at the temples, and I have spent ten years being careful not to look at him too long across a dinner table. Here there is no table.
I make room in the doorway. It is a small movement. He notices it, and takes it, and his bag brushes my hip as he passes into the cool of the hall.
Later, when the wine is open and the windows are, he sits at the other end of the kitchen bench and says, looking at the glass and not at me, “Your mother and I are taking some time. She thinks I'm in Hamburg.” The candle is burning down between us. He has just handed me a secret and a choice in the same sentence, and the house, which was mine, is now something we have to share.
