Sublime

A months-old knot inside Marie-Laure begins to loosen.

Sometimes the things we think are lost are only hidden, waiting to be rediscovered.

A moan shudders through the rubble above them, and in the darkness Werner feels as if he is trapped inside the Nautilus, twenty meters down, while the tentacles of a dozen angry kraken lash its hull. He knows the transmitter must be high in the house. Close to the shelling. He says, “I saved her only to hear her die.

He turns. “Nichts,” he says. Nothing.

Strange to think of his voice still flying through the air, already a country away, growing weaker every mile.

Each morning comes along and you assume it will be similar enough to the previous one—that you will be safe, that your family will be alive, that you will be together, that life will remain mostly as it was. Then a moment arrives and everything changes.

between market stalls, unconscious or worse. No mail service. Telegraph lines down. The most recent newspaper is

Could he, by some miracle, keep this going? Could they hide here until the war ends? Until the armies finish marching back and forth above their heads, until all they have to do is push open the door and shift some stones aside and the house has become a ruin beside the sea? Until he can hold her fingers in his palms and lead her out into the sunsh