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Father Edouard, unlike the rest of the town, doesn’t appear to hold it against us. His main source of trouble this day, it seems, is Gerard—a friend of Henri’s from grade school who will serve as a godparent alongside Marie. Every time Gerard makes Marie laugh, offers her assistance or even stands beside her, Edouard’s square jaw flexes until I’m certain he’s going to crack teeth. At one point, most unpriestly of all, I catch him rolling his eyes.

The service begins and, after a few prayers, he asks who the parents are. Henri grips my hand and we step forward. “We are,” the two of us say in unison. Henri squeezes my hand and I truly feel, in this moment, that I don’t have a single regret. I’m a mother because of what happened. Might I have had my own children if it hadn’t? Perhaps, but it no longer matters to me. I couldn’t love Cecelia more than I do, and I wouldn’t trade her for a hundred children I might have had otherwise. The sun floats in through the stained-glass windows, and Cecelia, happy in my arms, smiles at me, as if she knew long before I did that this was exactly what was meant to be.

After the service we invite everyone back to the farm for a small party. Marie goes to the vestibule to get Cecelia’s pram, and Gerard follows, complimenting her smallest actions—you’re so good with the baby, so careful, I wonder if she’ll be as lovely as her aunt.

“He’s making a fool of himself,” Henri groans as we exit the church.

Edouard’s face has been strained for some time. He cuts a quick glance toward Marie and Gerard. “Yes,” he growls. “He is.”

“Well, he’ll need to work fast,” I reply, smiling to myself, “given how soon we move.” We are due to travel by ship from Calais to England in April, when Henri will next have leave and Cecelia will be big enough to withstand the trip. Once Henri gets us settled—a friend from Oxford has already found us something to let in the British countryside—he will join General de Gaulle’s London-based forces, though I wish I could dissuade him.

Edouard’s face jerks toward mine. “Move? Move where?”

“England,” I reply. I’m surprised Marie hasn’t mentioned it. “The countryside is safer there, until the war concludes.”

He looks at me with a hint of confusion and then—worry. “Most say the war won’t affect us,” he comments, watching my face. “But you feel otherwise.”

I hesitate. “People are putting an awful lot of stock in the Maginot Line and ignoring the many other ways the Germans could break into France. They’ve already taken over Poland. They beat us conclusively at Saar. It would be naïve to assume they won’t make every effort to take France. They need our ports if nothing else.”

“But surely moving so far...” He glances back at Marie, that worry in his eyes deepening. “Moving so far is extreme. Even if the Germans want the coastline, and take it, they’d have little use for a small town like ours.”

“Saint Antoine rests just between Germany and Paris, and just between Germany and the Normandy coast. And if the Germans do come, there are…other concerns.”

His brows come together for a moment, in confusion, and then he nods. “Because Madame Durand was Jewish?” he asks.

Henri stiffens beside me. “I’m surprised my sister chose to share that with you.”

Edouard frowns. “She didn’t. It’s been mentioned to me by others in town.” We all walk together in silence, letting that sink in. People in town are already discussing it, this meaningless piece of Henri and Marie’s past, though it nets them nothing. Which means that once Saint Antoine is occupied and those words have value—and can be exchanged to curry favor—people in this town will be lining up to share them.

Marie’s friend Jeannette waits at the house when we arrive with Lucien and Charlotte in tow. A widow since the Saar Offensive, she looks much thinner and older than she did when I left a year ago. Worry lines crease her lovely face and her smile flickers out now as soon as it’s begun. The children, thank God, are unaffected as yet by the change of circumstances, and have both grown so much—Luc now an adorable, rosy-cheeked toddler, walking on unsteady legs through the house, knocking things over. Charlotte, age five, is as graceful as a princess when she holds Cecelia for the first time, but her face breaks into a wide grin, one that’s missing several teeth, when Cecelia burps.

The sight of it squeezes my heart so tight it hurts. We’ve found ways to help them with money and food, but we cannot convince Jeannette to leave. She, like everyone else, believes this war will come to nothing, and refuses on the most ridiculous bases: she can’t leave her mother and grandmother, though she only sees them once every few months, and she wants to stay close to people she knows—even though we are the only people here with whom she’s friendly; and being a practicing Jew, most of this town will turn on her the minute the Germans arrive.

Today I try to convince her to get the children passports, which she insists is unnecessary. I suggest she could bring her mother and grandmother with her to England, and she laughs.

“They’d never go. The English don’t practice good hygiene, you know,” she argues. “Covered with lice during the war.”

I sigh. “Don’t you think, maybe, they were covered with lice because they were in the middle of a war?”

“No,” she says very seriously. “My mother still talks about it. They just refused to bathe.”

I feel despair as I watch Lucien and Charlotte run around the room. No one, no one, is taking the threat of Hitler as seriously as they should.

Gerard emerges from the bathroom, asking us all where Marie went. Jeannette and I exchange a quick glance—both Marie and Father Edouard are absent, suddenly, and there’s no good reason for either of them to have snuck outside alone on a bitterly cold November afternoon.

Gerard goes in search of them. Henri, playing with the children on the floor, notices nothing, which is for the best since Marie and Edouard both look dazed and unsteady when they return a moment later with Gerard. Edouard takes his leave, but the whole time he’s congratulating Henri and myself, his eyes are on her...different than they’ve ever been before.

“So, where did you and Edouard go this afternoon?” I ask later in the day, when the guests are gone and Henri isn’t listening.

She blinks and a flush colors her cheeks. “He just wanted to see the orchard.”

I raise a brow. “In November?”

Her gaze rests on her hands rather than on me. “Yes, that’s what I said too,” she murmurs.

I hesitate, torn between pushing and letting her have her secrets. I finally decide to let her keep them for now. If something did happen, she has a lot to think about. As much as I did that first time Henri kissed me, certainly, and I wasn’t ready then to mull it over aloud.

The truth, I figure, will come out in time. I just hope she doesn’t make a mistake she can’t undo before then.