They were being sent to another camp.

She felt a wave of impotent rage. She would never survive a forced march through the snow to another camp.

“No,” she muttered. Talking to herself had become a way of life. For months, as she stood in line at work, doing something that repelled and horrified her, she whispered to herself. As she sat on a hole in a row of pit toilets, surrounded by other woman with dysentery, staring at the women sitting across from her, trying not to gag on the stench of their bowel movements, she whispered to herself. In the beginning, it had been stories she told herself about the future, memories she shared with herself about the past.

Now it was just words. Gibberish sometimes, anything to remind herself that she was human and alive.

Her toe caught on something and she pitched to the ground, falling face-first in the dirty snow.

“To your feet,” someone yelled. “March.”

Isabelle couldn’t move, but if she stayed there, they’d whip her again. Or worse.

“On your feet,” Micheline said.

“I can’t.”

“You can. Now. Before they see you’ve fallen.” Micheline helped her to her feet.

Isabelle and Micheline fell into the ragged line of prisoners, walking wearily forward, past the brick-walled perimeter of the camp, beneath the watchful eye of the soldier in the watchtower.

They walked for two days, traveled thirty-five miles, collapsing on the cold ground at night, huddling together for warmth, praying to see the dawn, only to be wakened by whistles and told to march again.

How many died along the way? She wanted to remember their names, but she was so cold and hungry and exhausted her brain barely worked.

Finally, they arrived at their destination, a train station, where they were shoved onto cattle cars that smelled of death and excrement. Black smoke rose into the snow-whitened sky. The trees were bare. There were no birds anymore in the sky, no chirping or screeching or chatter of living things filled this forest.

Isabelle clambered up onto the bales of hay that were stacked along the wall and tried to make herself as small as possible. She pulled her bleeding knees into her chest and wrapped her arms around her ankles to conserve what little warmth she had.

The pain in her chest was excruciating. She covered her mouth just as a cough racked her, bent her forward.

“There you are,” Micheline said in the dark, climbing onto the hay bale beside her.

Isabelle let out a sigh of relief, and immediately she was coughing again. She put a hand over her mouth and felt blood spray into her palm. She’d been coughing up blood for weeks now.

Isabelle felt a dry hand on her forehead and she coughed again.

“You’re burning up.”

The cattle car doors clanged shut. The carriage shuddered and the giant iron wheels began to turn. The car swayed and clattered. Inside, the women banded together and sat down. At least in this weather their urine would freeze in the barrel and not slosh all over.

Isabelle sagged next to her friend and closed her eyes.

From somewhere far away, she heard a high-pitched whistling sound. A bomb falling. The train screeched to a halt and the bomb exploded, near enough that the carriage rattled. The smell of smoke and fire filled the air. The next one could fall on this train and kill them all.

*   *   *

Four days later, when the train finally came to a complete stop (it had slowed dozens of times to avoid being bombed) the doors clattered open to reveal a white landscape broken only by the black greatcoats of the SS officers waiting outside.

Isabelle sat up, surprised to find that she wasn’t cold. She felt hot; so hot she was perspiring.

She saw how many of her friends had died overnight, but there was no time to grieve for them, no time to say a prayer or whisper a good-bye. The Nazis on the platform were coming for them, blowing their whistles, yelling.

“Schnell! Schnell!”

Isabelle nudged Micheline awake. “Take my hand,” Isabelle said.

The two women held hands and climbed gingerly down from the hay bales. Isabelle stepped over a dead body, from which someone had already taken the shoes.

On the other side of the platform, a line of prisoners was forming.

Isabelle limped forward. The woman in front of Isabelle stumbled and fell to her knees.

An SS officer yanked the woman to her feet and shot her in the face.

Isabelle didn’t slow down. Alternately freezing cold and burning hot, unsteady on her feet, she plodded forward through the snowy forest until another camp came into view.

“Schnell!”

Isabelle followed the women in front of her. They passed through open gates, past a throng of skeletal men and women in gray-striped pajamas who looked at them through a chain-link fence.

“Juliette!”

She heard the name. At first it meant nothing to her, just another sound. Then she remembered.

She’d been Juliette. And Isabelle before that. And the Nightingale. Not just F-5491.

She glanced at the skeletal prisoners lined up behind the chain link.

Someone was waving at her. A woman: gray skin and a hooked, pointed nose and sunken eyes.

Eyes.

Isabelle recognized the tired, knowing gaze fixed on her.

Anouk.

Isabelle stumbled to the chain-link fence.

Anouk met her. Their fingers clasped through the ice-cold metal. “Anouk,” she said, hearing the break in her voice. She coughed a little, covered her mouth.

The sadness in Anouk’s dark eyes was unbearable. Her friend’s gaze cut to a building whose chimney puffed out putrid black smoke. “They’re killing us to cover what they’ve done.”

“Henri? Paul?… Gaëtan?”

“They were all arrested, Juliette. Henri was hanged in the town square. The rest…” She shrugged.

Isabelle heard an SS soldier yell at her. She backed away from the fence. She wanted to say something real to Anouk, something that would last, but she couldn’t do anything but cough. She covered her mouth and stumbled sideways, got back into line.

She saw her friend mouth “Good-bye,” and Isabelle couldn’t even respond. She was so, so tired of good-byes.

THIRTY-SEVEN

Even on this blue-skied March day, the apartment on the Avenue de La Bourdonnais felt like a mausoleum. Dust covered every surface and layered the floor. Vianne went to the windows and tore the blackout shades down, letting light into this room for the first time in years.

It looked like no one had been in this apartment for some time. Probably not since that day Papa had left to save Isabelle.

Most of the paintings were still on the walls and the furniture was in place—some of it had been hacked up for firewood and piled in the corner. An empty soup bowl and spoon sat on the dining room table. His volumes of self-published poetry lined the mantel. “It doesn’t look like she’s been here. We must try the Hôtel Lutetia.”

Vianne knew she should pack up her family’s things, claim these remnants of a different life, but she couldn’t do it now. She didn’t want to. Later.

She and Antoine and Sophie left the apartment. On the street outside, all around them were signs of recovery. Parisians were like moles, coming out into the sunshine after years in the dark. But still there were food lines everywhere and rationing and deprivation. The war might have been winding down—the Germans were retreating everywhere—but it wasn’t over yet.

They went to the Hôtel Lutetia, which had been home to the Abwehr under the occupation and was now a reception center for people returning from the camps.

Vianne stood in the elegant, crowded lobby. As she looked around, she felt sick to her stomach and grateful that she’d left Daniel with Mother Marie-Therese. The reception area was filled with rail-thin, bald, vacant-eyed people dressed in rags. They looked like walking cadavers. Moving among them were doctors and Red Cross workers and journalists.