Karl’s study was her favourite room.
It contained shelves of architecture books, rolled drawings tied with string, a collection of mechanical pencils, old photographs of Dresden, and a long drafting table positioned beside the window.
Karl had stopped taking professional commissions years earlier, but he still drew.
Sometimes he sketched buildings he remembered.
Sometimes he designed alterations to houses that did not need altering.
Occasionally he drew structures Emma invented.
Together, they produced plans for a library shaped like a whale, a school with a slide between every floor, and a small railway station designed exclusively for hedgehogs.
Anna kept these drawings in a folder.
Matthias complained about the amount of paper they used.
Karl told him that paper was considerably cheaper than actual construction.
Emma loved watching her grandfather work.
His hands were large, with swollen knuckles and pale scars from years of using tools. But when he held a pencil, his movements became precise.
He could draw a straight line without a ruler.
Emma considered this a form of magic.
“How do you do that?”
“Practice.”
“Can you teach me?”
“Of course.”
She placed her small hand beside his on the table.
Karl drew a line.
Emma copied it.
Hers curved upward in the middle.
She frowned.
“It’s wrong.”
“No,” Karl said. “It’s crooked.”
“That’s the same.”
“Not at all. Wrong means you’ve misunderstood what you’re trying to do. Crooked means your hand needs more practice.”
Emma tried again.
The second line was worse.
Karl examined it thoughtfully.
“Well, perhaps we’ll begin with shorter lines.”
She laughed.
For months, their afternoons followed a comfortable routine.
Emma returned from kindergarten, washed her hands under Anna’s supervision, and hurried to Karl’s study.
He would have an activity waiting for her.
Sometimes it involved drawing.
Sometimes they baked simple biscuits, though Karl measured ingredients with the unnecessary precision of a man who believed that cooking should obey the same principles as engineering.
Sometimes they walked along the Elbe, stopping to examine bridges.
Karl could spend twenty minutes discussing the shape of an arch.
Emma listened with the solemn attention of a child who believed her grandfather knew the answer to almost everything.
And when he did not know something, he admitted it.
“Why do pigeons walk like that?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re supposed to know.”
“I’m an architect, not a pigeon.”
She laughed.
He bought her a pretzel from a bakery near the river.
They sat on a bench, watching the water move beneath the bridge.
Emma would break off pieces of bread and offer him the largest.
Karl always refused at first.
She always insisted.
It became one of their small rituals.
After Ingrid died, Matthias had worried that his father would withdraw from ordinary life.
Instead, Emma had given him something to anticipate each afternoon.
Karl never said that.
He merely began keeping a packet of her favourite biscuits in his desk drawer and stopped scheduling appointments during the hours when she was likely to come home.
The first sign that something more serious was happening came during a walk they had taken dozens of times.
Emma was six by then.
It was a bright Saturday morning in early September, and the trees along the river were beginning to turn yellow.
Karl had promised to take her to see a small playground near the Elbe.
Anna was working from home, and Matthias had gone to collect groceries.
Karl knew the way.
He had walked through that part of Dresden since before Emma’s parents were born.
They reached the playground shortly after ten.
Emma spent twenty minutes climbing, then another fifteen trying to persuade her grandfather to use the swings.
Karl refused.
“My knees are older than your father.”
“Grandpa, knees can’t be older than people.”
“Mine have managed it.”
She laughed.
They stopped at a bakery on the way home.
Karl bought two pretzels and a small carton of apple juice.
Emma carried the bag.
At the next intersection, Karl turned left.
Emma stopped.
“Grandpa?”
He looked back.
“Come along.”
“Our house is that way.”
She pointed right.
Karl glanced toward the road.
For a moment, he seemed irritated.
“No, darling. We need to go left.”
“But the tram stop is that way.”
“Yes.”
“We don’t go past the tram stop.”
Karl looked at the buildings.
Something about the street appeared unfamiliar.
He had walked it hundreds of times, but the arrangement of the shops no longer made sense. The bakery was where he expected it to be, yet the intersection seemed to lead in the wrong direction.
He looked up at the street sign.
The name was familiar.
He could not remember why.
Emma waited beside him.
“Grandpa?”
Karl took out his phone.
“We’ll check.”
He opened the map application and stared at it.
The little blue dot moved when he turned.
He had always disliked navigation systems, preferring the certainty of paper maps.
Now he could not understand which direction the arrow indicated.
He felt suddenly hot.
Emma took his hand.
“Are we lost?”
Karl looked down at her.
He wanted to say no.
He wanted to explain that he had simply been distracted, that they would be home in a few minutes, that a man who had designed buildings across Saxony was perfectly capable of navigating his own neighbourhood.
Instead, he looked again at the road.
“I think we may have taken a wrong turn.”
Emma considered this.
“That’s okay.”
He swallowed.
“Is it?”
She nodded.
“You always say we can draw a new line.”
Karl stared at her.
Then he managed a smile.
