His hair was cut and combed, his face had filled out, and the haunted watchfulness that had lived in him in that dim curtained house was simply gone, replaced by something slow and easy and content.

And he was wearing a short-sleeved cotton shirt.

That is the detail I hold onto, the one that undoes me every time: a light summer shirt, his forearms bare in the sun, no coat, no heavy wool, no layers pulled on in a warm house to hide what someone had done.

He had spent months unable to let anyone see his own skin.

Now he stood in the sunlight with his arms bare, tending flowers by the water, a man with nothing to hide and no one left to be afraid of.