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‘That’s the last arrivals for the week checked in. They’re a lively group – they’ve already demolished the apple cakes you put out. If they actually do all the climbs they’re planning to complete, they’ll keep the kitchens busy.’

Noemi wriggled her toes in the soft grass as Pascal bent down to scoop Karoline off her knee. The one-year-old’s impromptu nap had sent her mother’s legs to sleep too.

‘That’s fine; we can get extra help in from the village if it’s needed. What about Debora? Is she comfortable in the cottage? Does she know she can have her meals there, if she doesn’t want to deal with a crowd?’

Pascal nodded and waved to three-year-old Robin, who was busily collecting leaves to make a forest for his toy fort. ‘She’s all settled in, and she knows where you are if she wants to talk.’

Noemi blew her husband a kiss as he lifted Karoline onto his shoulder and stretched out under a sun that still held the last rays of summer, grateful for a few moments where nobody needed her.

The lodge they’d opened four years earlier overlooking the pretty Swiss town of Appenzell – with the proceeds of the sale of both the Drachmann and Lindiger estates – was rarely quiet.

It catered for the hikers and skiers who came all year round to explore the surrounding mountain ranges and the town’s prettily painted wooden houses.

Noemi’s first thought when she’d seen it was, It’s not Unterwald, but it’s as close to a replica of the lives we had there as we’ll ever build for ourselves.

That first impulse hadn’t changed. The future could never have been their home town, it could never have been Germany, but they needed something of the familiar to hold on to.

Now they lived in a place where the seasons mattered, and life was tied to nature’s rituals.

They lived close to mountains where they could wander – together and alone – if the world slipped off-kilter.

And they lived in a country which hadn’t been torn apart by the war.

Where people accepted incomers of all sorts and didn’t ask what had brought them there.

What had started for the two of them as a skiing holiday in the early months of 1946 had become a home the moment they saw the ‘For Sale’ sign outside the flower-decked lodge.

They’d bought it at once and got married at once, hearts racing with the possibility of the fresh start they were desperate to find.

And in the years that followed that decision, the lodge had become a place of sanctuary for far more lives than just theirs.

‘It’s a perfect tourist spot, but we could provide a refuge here too. Somewhere for people to come when the outside world is too much. And a place perhaps where we could put the things we’ve learned since the war to good use.’

Neither Pascal nor Noemi could remember whose idea it was first, not that it mattered.

The idea had borne fruit and seeded itself through the connections Noemi worked hard to forge and Pascal worked as hard to sustain.

Including Rabbi Mendel, who’d returned to Munich and his own synagogue and wept with delight when Noemi’s refusal to let anyone important go from her life found him.

With his advice and guidance to steer them – and with the help of the men from the town who gave their time freely to refurbish an old cottage beside the main lodge – they built a hideaway for the wanderers whose lives had been snapped in two by the war and hadn’t yet healed.

The building those visitors used was completely self-contained; stays in it had no time limits.

Some sought it out for a day or two; some came for a month – or more.

Most of the lost souls who found their way to it were Jewish but not all.

A lot of them wanted to talk, a lot of them didn’t; each visitor set their own rules.

And some needed practical help with visas or tracing services, or with the ongoing fight for reparations.

Whatever was required by them was found.

And they’ve brought so much hope with them, which has helped us too. Even the ones who’ve suffered terribly don’t want to give up their faith in the world.

Noemi got reluctantly to her feet as the sun started to dip.

It was still warm in the meadow – she could have happily followed Karoline’s lead and taken a nap.

But the food at the Drachmann Lodge – which was the only name they’d ever considered for it – was one of its biggest draws outside the area’s breathtaking scenery.

Noemi not only had to oversee the dinner preparations, she also had a celebration cake waiting to be iced in her trademark blush and cherry pinks.

‘This came for you. Give him my regards when you write back.’

Pascal passed her the envelope addressed in Matthias’s looping hand as she stretched up to kiss Karoline’s head.

She checked his expression while she took it – checking his expression and assessing his mood was a habit she doubted she’d ever break – but there were no questions lurking in his eyes, and there was certainly no doubt, which was a relief.

It had been a different story the first time a letter came.

I hope this has found you and that you are happy and well. I couldn’t think of anywhere else you would have gone except Unterwald after you left Warsaw, or after I hope you left. I don’t even know if you survived the city’s downfall – I never could find anyone who’d known you, although I tried.

I didn’t think I’d make it through if I’m honest. My leg was in pretty bad shape by the time rescue came, and you know how rough the hospitals were by the end.

I hope you were spared from witnessing that.

The Nazis took the city apart with dynamite and flamethrowers after the surrender, and the Soviets let them do it.

They captured me with the rest of the partisans, but they put me in a prisoner of war camp in Woldenberg, not one of their terrifying death camps – they never guessed I was a Jew.

Once that was liberated, I went to Poznań, but the family I came looking for here are all gone too.

I can’t face returning to Warsaw – there’s nobody there but the dead.

I don’t know if I’ll stay in Poland. I suppose I don’t know where my place in the world is anymore. Should I wonder if it’s with you?

Matthias’s first letter had appeared in Unterwald in December 1945, although it was dated some months earlier.

It arrived after the inquest into Viktor’s death – which was deemed to be an accident, despite Noemi’s presence in the barn when the fire happened, and the rumours that it might not be.

It arrived before either Pascal or Noemi had decided what to do with their respective inheritances, or each other.

And in the middle of one of the black moods which continued – although with far less frequency – to descend over Pascal.

Noemi followed her kiss for Karoline with one for her husband.

Neither of them liked to dwell on those days, but the truth was that for every step they’d taken towards each other as they tried to reconnect, they’d both found a reason to step back.

The circling – the constant fretting over whether they could ever really love each other enough to live with the past – had become exhausting.

Noemi had started to fear she might become as trapped by that as she nearly had by her thirst for revenge.

Matthias’s letter, and the choices that came with it, had shaken them both.

Pascal had been terrified that Noemi would return to the man who’d fought beside her, not against her.

Noemi had compared the man she loved and the man she thought she should, and wavered more than Pascal knew.

The fight they’d had in the wake of Should I wonder if it’s you – when the Hitler-following boy and the scared Jewish girl resurfaced – had torn layers of skin off them both.

‘I’m going to leave you.’

‘You should.’

They’d flung the possibility forward and back, trailing, it’s what you deserve , on both sides behind it. They’d dug their claws into the softest skin in the way only people with a long history and deep feelings could.

But we didn’t give up on each other, and I’m glad of it. Because he’s my past and my present and my future and – for all the wounds we could, and do, pick at when the shadows come – nobody else could ever be all those things.

Noemi smoothed the envelope and put it unopened into her pocket; there was no need to read it straight away.

Matthias had his own family now, a wife and a son he doted on.

He’d gone to America in the end, and found a community of Polish refugees he could share his memories and his hopes with. Matthias was happy, and so was she .

She gazed out across the flower-studded meadow.

Her husband and children were making daisy chains that they would no doubt soon insist she wore alongside the silver locket she never took off.

She could have been watching an echo of herself and Pascal weaving the bracelets and crowns they’d once draped over their own mothers.

There’s no breaking from the past because the past never finishes. Its legacy lives on, good and bad.

That had been the hardest lesson she and Pascal had had to learn.

That as much as they loved each other, they couldn’t move on and never look back, that their past selves would continue to rise up and get in the way.

They’d acknowledged that possibility five years earlier outside a tavern in Unterwald, but now they’d lived it, and that life had brought them both happiness and pain.

But both sides are worth it, because we’ve learned to pick up the past and carry it in a way that won’t break us, and one day our children will do the same.

Pascal turned and saw she was watching them. He waved and burst out laughing as Karoline – who was Frieda in miniature – threw the pile of daisy chains up into the air and they landed on her brother. His laugh was everything to her. Their children were everything to them both.

We’ve rewritten the landscape. We’ve filled it with kindness and forgiveness and promise.

She smiled and waved back, her heart bursting with the new family they’d created out of the best bits of themselves and the good people who’d loved them.

Then she went to the kitchens to finish her mother’s cake, ready to be presented to the next happy couple taking a leap into the future and a chance on the hope baked into love.

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