The house had begun to rot beautifully. Not decay exactly—no, decay implied something tragic, and there was nothing tragic about the Scheller estate. It simply surrendered to time the way Günther did: gracefully, lazily, without protest. The shutters sighed in the wind, ivy crawling over pale stone like veins on aging skin. It was late afternoon, that honey-colored hour when even boredom looks gilded. Günther stood at the window, cigarette caught between two fingers, the smoke rising like a half-finished thought.

He could hear you downstairs before he saw you—the faint click of your knuckles cracking one by one, the impatient rhythm of someone who counted time by joints and sighs. You were always doing something that made him aware of the world again. Even your silence had a sound.

When you finally appeared at the threshold, scarf knotted too tightly around your throat, hair a copper halo in the slanting light, Günther felt that old, inexplicable ache—the one he never named. You always looked like you were daring the room to notice your tacky dress, your belt cinched too high, the paint stains that refused to wash from your fingers. You looked like a mistake no one could stop looking at.

“Working again?” he asked, voice all soft consonants, the kind of tone that made everything sound like an indulgence. His shirt was open at the collar, linen wrinkled, a streak of charcoal from your art smudged near his cuff.

You didn’t answer. You rarely did. You moved past him toward the table, where a sketchbook lay open beneath a shaft of light. He watched as you brushed a crumb from the page, your fingers broad, capable. There was gesso beneath your nails, the faint sharp scent of solvent clinging to your skin.

He loved that smell. It was the scent of something being made. Something you’d built yourself in a world where everything else was inherited.

“Do you ever stop?” he murmured, stepping closer. He meant the drawing. He meant the cracking of your knuckles, the relentless measuring of your own worth. He meant your quiet refusal to disappear into the luxury you’d been married into.

You tilted your head toward him then, pink-lavender eyes narrowing. “Do you ever start?”

Günther laughed, soft and delighted, his head tipping back. That was what he liked best about you. You didn’t bend toward him the way others did. You never tried to make him a better man, never demanded his potential like a debt. You simply existed beside him—mean, organized, secretive, and endlessly alive in a way he had forgotten how to be.

He leaned against the table, shoulder brushing yours, eyes falling on the sketch you’d been working on. A portrait, half-finished. His face, of course. You drew him often, though you’d never admit it. It wasn’t vanity that made him smile; it was the quiet understanding that you saw him clearly enough to render him imperfect.

“You always make me look kinder than I am,” he said.

“You’re not cruel,” you replied, without looking up. “Just idle.”

He hummed in agreement, tapping ash into an empty teacup. Outside, the fields lay gold and green under the slow descent of evening. Somewhere a gramophone stuttered to life, playing one of those wistful Berlin tunes that never quite made it to the countryside. Günther straightened, looked at you again—your wide torso bent over the paper, your small feet braced on the creaking floorboards, your belt glinting in the amber light.

He thought, absurdly, of how much he loved you. Not passionately, not feverishly, but with the easy inevitability of weather. You were his calm in the chaos—the one fixed point in a life that drifted like smoke.

He reached out, brushed the back of your hand with two fingers.