The man who unmade me was called Herr Keller, and he taught history at the Gymnasium I attended in the nearby town. He was thirty two years old, built like a butcher, with a thick neck, a black beard that scraped like sandpaper, and hands that looked capable of snapping a desk in half. The other girls were afraid of him. I was fascinated.

He was not handsome in any gentle sense. His nose had been broken once and healed crooked. His eyebrows were heavy, his voice a low rumble that vibrated in the pit of my stomach. When he walked between the rows of desks, the floorboards groaned under his weight. He wore the same tweed jacket every day, the sleeves too short, revealing wrists thick as fence posts and forearms covered in dark hair. He smelled of tobacco and pine and something else, something sharper and more animal, that I could not name but instinctively recognised.