Vianne holding a shovel covered in gore. Beside her, Beck in a pool of blood.

Vianne pale as chalk, trembling. I killed him.

After that her memories were jumbled except for Vianne’s anger. You are not welcome here. If you return, I’ll turn you in myself.

Isabelle lay back down slowly. The pain of that memory was worse than her injury. For once, Vianne had been right to cast Isabelle out. What had she been thinking to hide the airman on her sister’s property, with a German Wehrmacht captain billeted there? No wonder people didn’t trust her. “How long have I been here?”

“Four days. Your wound is much improved. Your sister stitched it up nicely. Your fever broke yesterday.”

“And … Vianne? She is not fine, of course. So how is she?”

“We protected her as best we could. She refused to go into hiding. So Henri and Didier buried both bodies and cleaned the barn and tore the motorcycle down to parts.”

“She’ll be questioned,” Isabelle said. “And killing that man will haunt her. Hating doesn’t come easy for her.”

“It will before this war is over.”

Isabelle felt her stomach tighten in shame and regret. “I love her, you know. Or I want to. How come I forget that the minute we disagree about something?”

“She said something very similar at the frontier.”

Isabelle started to roll over and gasped at the pain in her shoulder. Taking a deep breath, she steeled herself and eased slowly onto her side. She’d misjudged how close he was to her, how small the bed. They were lying like lovers; she on her side looking up at him; he on his back staring at the ceiling. “Vianne went to the border?”

“You were in a coffin in the back of the wagon. She wanted to make sure we crossed safely.” She heard a smile in his voice, or imagined she did. “She threatened to kill me if I didn’t take good care of you.”

“My sister said that?” she said, not quite believing it. But she hardly believed that Gaëtan was the kind of man who would lie to reunite sisters. In profile, his features were razor sharp, even by lamplight. He refused to look at her, and he was as close to the edge of the bed as he could be.

“She was afraid you’d die. We both were.”

He said it so softly she barely could hear. “It feels like old times,” she said cautiously, afraid to say the wrong thing. More afraid to say nothing at all. Who knew how many chances there would be in such uncertain times? “You and me alone in the dark. Remember?”

“I remember.”

“Tours already feels like a lifetime ago,” she went on. “I was just a girl.”

He said nothing.

“Look at me, Gaëtan.”

“Go to sleep, Isabelle.”

“You know I will keep asking until you can’t stand it.”

He sighed and rolled onto his side.

“I think about you,” she said.

“Don’t.” His voice was rough.

“You kissed me,” she said. “It wasn’t a dream.”

“You can’t remember that.”

Isabelle felt something strange at his words, a breathless little flutter in her chest. “You want me as much as I want you,” she said.

He shook his head in denial, but it was the silence she heard; the acceleration of his breathing.

“You think I’m too young and too innocent and too impetuous. Too everything. I get it. People have always said that about me. I’m immature.”

“That’s not it.”

“But you’re wrong. Maybe you weren’t wrong two years ago. I did say I love you, which must have sounded insane.” She drew in a breath. “But it’s not insane now, Gaëtan. Maybe it’s the only sane thing in all of this. Love, I mean. We’ve seen buildings blown up in front of us and our friends are getting arrested and deported. God knows if we’ll ever see them again. I could die, Gaëtan,” she said quietly. “I’m not saying that in some schoolgirl-try-to-get-the-boy-to-kiss-me kind of way. It’s true and you know it. Either one of us could die tomorrow. And you know what I would regret?”

“What?”

“Us.”

“There can’t be an us, Iz. Not now. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you from the beginning.”

“If I promise to let it go, will you answer one question truthfully?”

“Just one?”

“One. And then I’ll go to sleep. I promise.”

He nodded.

“If we weren’t here—hiding in a safe house—if the world weren’t ripping itself apart, if this was just an ordinary day in an ordinary world, would you want there to be an us, Gaëtan?”

She saw how his face crumpled, how pain exposed his love.

“It doesn’t matter, don’t you see that?”

“It’s the only thing that matters, Gaëtan.” She saw love in his eyes. What did words matter after that?

She was wiser than she’d been before. Now she knew how fragile life and love were. Maybe she would love him for only this day, or maybe for only the next week, or maybe until she was an old, old woman. Maybe he would be the love of her life … or her love for the duration of this war … or maybe he would only be her first love. All she really knew was that in this terrible, frightening world, she had stumbled into something unexpected.

And she would not let it go again.

“I knew it,” she said to herself, smiling. His breath skimmed against her lips, as intimate as any kiss. She leaned over him, her gaze on him, steady, honest, and turned off the lamp.

In the dark, she snuggled against him, burrowed deeper under the blankets. At first he lay stiffly against her, as if he were afraid even to touch her, but gradually, he relaxed. He rolled onto his back and started to snore. Sometime—she didn’t know when—she closed her eyes and reached out, placing a hand in the hollow of his stomach, feeling it rise and fall with his breathing. It was like resting her hand on the ocean in summer, when the tide was coming in.

Touching him, she fell asleep.

*   *   *

The nightmares wouldn’t let her go. In some distant part of her brain she heard her own whimpering, heard Sophie say, “Maman, you’re taking all the blankets,” but none of it wakened her. In her nightmare, she was in a chair, being interrogated. The boy, Daniel. He’s a Jew. Give him to me, Von Richter said, shoving his gun in her face … then his face changed, melted a little, and he turned into Beck, who was holding the photograph of his wife and shaking his head, but the side of his face was missing … and then Isabelle lying on the floor, bleeding, saying, I’m sorry Vianne, and Vianne was yelling. You’re not welcome here …

Vianne woke with a start, breathing hard. The same nightmares had plagued her for six days; she consistently woke feeling exhausted and worried. It was November now, and there had been no word about Isabelle at all. She eased out from beneath the blankets. The floor was cold, but not as cold as it would be in a few weeks. She reached for the shawl she’d left on the foot of the bed and wrapped it around her shoulders.

Von Richter had claimed the upstairs bedroom. Vianne had abandoned the floor to him, choosing to move with her children into the smaller downstairs bedroom, where they slept together on the double bed.

Beck’s room. No wonder she dreamed of him in here. The air held on to his scent, reminded her that the man she’d known no longer lived, that she had killed him. She longed to do penance for this sin, but what could she do? She had killed a man—a decent man, in spite of it all. It didn’t matter to her that he was the enemy or even that she’d done it to save her sister. She knew she had made the right choice. It wasn’t right or wrong that haunted her. It was the act itself. Murder.

She left the bedroom and closed the door behind her, shutting it with a quiet click.

Von Richter sat on the divan, reading a novel, drinking a cup of real coffee. The aroma made her almost sick with longing. The Nazi had billeted here for several days already, and each of those mornings had smelled of rich, bitter roasted coffee—and Von Richter made sure she smelled it, and wanted it. But she couldn’t have so much as a sip; he made sure of that, too. Yesterday morning he had dumped an entire pot into the sink, smiling at her as he did so.