Free The Sandcastle Girls by Chris Bohjalian

he tells her, and he tries to smile. “I thought something might have happened to you. To all of you.”
    “I’d forgotten a hat,” she explains. “I was at the gate and I realized I’d forgotten a hat. Also … a handkerchief.” Her words catch in her throat. “My father and Mr. Martin are investigating when the first train cars will arrive with the aid. I said I would meet them later at the hospital.”
    “You shouldn’t be walking around Aleppo alone.”
    She smiles. “You sound like my father.”
    “People …”
    “Yes?”
    “People disappear here,” he says, and finally he allows himself to move. He crosses what feels like an ocean of longing between them.
    “I won’t,” she tells him.
    He takes the hat from her hands, still feeling a little unmoored, and starts to place it gently on her head. But she is shivering ever so slightly, which surprises him because he couldn’t imagine that this lioness from America ever trembled. And so he takes a step back, and she surprises him once again by shaking her head no. No. And then she is leaning into him, her hands flat on his chest, her eyes closed, and she is rising up and kissing him, her lips on his.
    The hat falls to the floor, and with the side of his foot he closes the door. Abruptly all is darkness and shadow, and her arms slide around his back. He quivers when he feels her fingers against his spine.
    “You’re ticklish,” she whispers, breathless, and he burrows his face in her neck, tasting the barest trace of talc on her skin, his jaw brushing the lace at the edge of her chemise beneath her dress. And then his hands are on her back, too, upon the waterfall of eyelets and the ribs and the long, dangling strings of her corset. She pulls his face back up to hers and seems about to say something more,but she doesn’t. Instead she kisses him again, opening her mouth to his, summoning his tongue and the fullness of his lips.
    Briefly they collapse onto the stairs that lead to the second floor, but only for a moment, only for the time it takes him to unbutton the front of her dress. Then she turns her back to him, her knees on the step, so he can more easily untie her corset. He is just starting that work when suddenly she looks back at him over her shoulder. His sight has adjusted enough to the dark that he can see a ripple of wariness amid the want in her eyes.
    “Your wife,” she says. “Have you done this with anyone since …”
    “No.”
    “Were you … were you thinking of her?”
    “No. I was thinking only of you.”
    She looks straight ahead at the stairway. He buries his forehead in her hair. He says, his voice as soft as a draft, “We shouldn’t do this. We won’t.”
    “I want to.”
    He sits on the stairway beside her and tenderly turns her body around by her hips. He is struck by how slight she is. How slender. How—even in the dim light of the corridor with the drapes drawn tight—beautiful. “There is tomorrow,” he says. “Or the next day.”
    “In this place? You just told me: people disappear here all the time.” There is a slight pout to her voice, but she rests her head on his shoulder and her hand on the inside of his knee.
    “I know,” he says. But that’s all. Two compact syllables. He understands now how quickly he is falling in love with her, but that soon—within days—he is indeed going to disappear.
    I N THE SQUARE near the citadel, Nevart watches how some of the children scream like gored animals and some move away from their mothers like the somnambulant. Some of the mothers and aunts have lied to their young ones, telling them that they will be spending but a night or a week at the orphanage, while the othershave told their children they will remain there until the end of the war—which then has left the women stymied, at a loss to explain whether the end of the war is months or years distant. The bravest of the mothers do not cry; the same with the bravest of the children. Many of the women