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“You realize I’ve killed men, yes?” he asks softly. “Do you judge me for it?”

“Of course not. You were at war.”

His hand glides through my hair. “And, if someone comes here to take the children, will you not be at war too? You had a gun in your hands the night I came home.”

I squeeze my eyes tight. If the children were hurt or threatened, there would be no end to my rage, to my need for revenge. But until that time, I want to remain who I am: a person who went to a dark place and came back from it. A person capable of evil but refusing to give in. “That’s different,” I whisper.

“Only because it’s hypothetical,” he replies. “Once it happens it won’t be different at all.”

I stretch alongside him, allowing my hand to splay across the flat plane of his stomach. “Is this really what you want to discuss with me right now?” I ask, as my hand begins to slide lower.

“Yes,” he says with a groan, “but I suppose it can wait.”

36

SARAH

Our lives don’t change dramatically with Henri home. He will be arrested if the Germans know he’s here, so he and Lucien and Charlotte still can’t be seen and we still need to listen, always, for the sound of approaching cars. But he fills us, as if our family was a slightly deflated balloon and he’s a huge burst of air. He sets traps in the woods to augment our paltry staples, and because he’s here, I can finally go into town, using our pathetic ration cards and a little bit of our money to buy food on the black market. His presence also means the world to the children, Lucien in particular, who never even met his father. For the first time in his life there’s someone around to wrestle on the floor and carry him on his shoulders.

I love having him home, and I love that, with him back, I’m no longer in this alone. Regardless of what skills I’ve acquired over the past year, I’m still only twenty-three. I need opinions other my own, and there’s no one alive whose opinions I trust more than Henri’s.

We go over the situation at night, once the children are in bed, and agree that we need to get out of the country. The “free zone” is hardly that—there are Germans in every town, and Jews are losing their jobs and their businesses everywhere. As no ships can sail out of Calais now, we will either need to get on a ship from Marseilles—more difficult, as the Germans are unlikely to let Henri board—or we can go through Spain to Lisbon and leave from there. But in order for that to happen, we need travel papers, ones that claim no one in the house is Jewish.

“I’ll ask around,” he says. “My Paris contacts will probably have gone underground. But there’s always Monsieur Roche in town.”

My teeth sink into my lip. I’ve only met Roche a few times, but he’s never struck me as either helpful or trustworthy. “Are you sure it’s safe to let him know Charlotte and Lucien are here? Is it safe to let him know you’re here?”

“For enough money, Roche will keep anything quiet,” he replies. It’s a struggle to accept that answer. Not when the children’s lives—and his—are at stake.

“People can be so much worse than you think,” I tell him, looking at my hands. Iris wasn’t merely the sister my mom disliked. She was evil, almost inhuman. My mother was a liar. Mathilde and the guards all looked perfectly normal but were willing to kill innocent women and newborns for a paycheck. And he has no idea how bad I am either. “You can’t trust anyone.”

He comes to where I stand. “Of course you can,” he says. “I trust you.”

I’m not sure you should. I keep the thought to myself as I rest my head on his chest, but something in the way he stiffens makes me feel like I said it aloud.

* * *

At the end of our first contented week together, I sit in the chair near the fire to give Cece her evening bottle, and Henri sits on the couch across from me, with Charlotte beside him and Lucien in his lap, telling them a bedtime story. His stories are normally about three children named Charlotte, Lucien and Cece, who go on amazing voyages and wind up living somewhere made of candy.

Tonight’s story, however, is different. He tells them about a distant island, lost in the middle of a stormy sea, with waves so huge that no ship’s captain dared approach for fear his boat would be dashed upon the high cliffs. “But one day a boat did arrive,” he tells them. “It was a rickety boat, and no one understood how it had survived the water, much less the waves, but it had. Aboard the boat were four girls. They were dressed strangely and claimed to remember nothing of the journey or their life before it, aside from their names.”

“What were their names?” Charlotte asks excitedly.

He grins. “No Charlottes in this bunch, I’m afraid,” he tells her. “Their names were Lea, Scylla, Aisling and Adelaide.”

My head jerks up. Adelaide. The woman Katrin told me we were descended from. The start of the first families—four families, four gifts. Could it be the same story? It must.

“The four girls,” he continues, unaware of my surprise, “were taken in by families in the village. Eventually, each fell in love, and married. But no children came, and one by one they each went to the priest seeking answers, and he told them no children would come until they left the island, because they’d each been given a gift, one that was meant to be shared.”

Charlotte’s small face falls. “But were they able to come back?”

“That’s what the girls asked too, because they were sad about leaving. And the priest told them, ‘You will all return home when the circle is complete.’”

“So, did they?” asks Charlotte. “Did the girls ever come back?”

“Pieces of them exist all around you,” Henri replies, “waiting to be called home. I feel certain they’ll get back eventually.”

“But where did they come from?” she persists. “They had to have parents.”