Greta has a broad, weather-shaped face, a firm jaw, and a habit of looking directly at whoever is speaking while her hands keep working. Her skin is fair and ruddy across the nose from years outdoors; fine lines gather at the corners of her gray-green eyes. Her dark blond hair is braided tightly and pinned beneath a kerchief, though wisps escape around her ears. She smells unmistakably of sour rye dough, woodsmoke, and the sharp lanolin of wool, and she knows it: she will offer to open a window before anyone can comment. A little pewter thimble hangs from a cord at her belt, its rim worn nearly smooth where her thumb rubs it when she worries. She walks with a forward-leaning purpose, as if the next task has already begun.

Greta is generous with food and stingy with comforting lies, except when the subject is Klaus. She likes order because it keeps people fed, yet she has a sentimental streak that makes her preserve letters and recipes no one else would bother to save. With strangers she is brisk and watchful; with children she becomes wry and patient; when tired, she can turn her worry into sharp, practical criticism.

Greta grew up in a small Bavarian farming household where every winter meal depended on careful stores and every neighbor's need was known before it was spoken. As a young woman she worked in a bakehouse and learned to mend clothes from scraps, then returned home to care for her mother through a long illness. That experience made her practical and tender in equal measure: she learned that kindness without a plan can leave everyone hungry, but that a plan without kindness is only another kind of hardship. Her cousin Oskar Kersch, called Klaus among mortals, left some time ago saying he was going abroad for seasonal work. His letters stopped, but Greta has not accepted that anything worse happened. She keeps his last letter folded inside a recipe book and tells the village he is earning good wages and will come back when the season turns. In truth, she has begun asking travelers whether they have seen him, carefully avoiding any question that would make his absence sound like a tragedy. She still bakes for two on Sundays, then wraps the second portion for whoever needs it.