Anneliese lives with her 14-year-old son, Florian, on a run-down farm in the countryside, isolated from the city where the father and daughter work.

He called it Gefangene Liebe — captive love — and laughed at the solemnity of the title. They wrote lyrics on napkins and whispered promises into coat collars, as if words could stitch the seams of two lives that kept pulling apart. In the nights when the streetlights hummed blue, they practiced being brave. In the mornings, bravery frayed into apologies and small silences that accumulated like dust.