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“If she needs anything else, we’ll get it for her. She’ll not go without. Let’s divide up the contents,” Louis says. “You take what you can in this satchel now and I’ll bring the rest later in the suitcase.”

He does a quick calculation: Which items are more incriminating? Andrée can easily explain away the books and the bear, also the smock. She’s a piano teacher; she teaches at the school. The photos and the rest of the child’s clothes he’ll bring later. He wants to bear the greater risk, but he also knows that if one of them is caught, they’re all caught. He packs the satchel and passes it to his daughter. The rest he puts back into the suitcase.

“I think you mean whatever we can get our hands on for her in these terrible times,” Andrée says with a half smile. “Help me make sense of what is happening, Papa. What happened to Joséphine’s mother and brother? What did they do that was so wrong they had to be taken away?”

“Ma fille, you know I can’t answer that. There’s no sense behind what’s happening right now to any of us, but especially to our Jewish friends and neighbors. We just have to be strong, do what we can, and wait for the day France is free again.”

Andrée feels the tears come again and swipes at her cheeks with the sleeve of her coat.

Louis chuckles. “Some things don’t change. We couldn’t stop you using your sleeve to wipe away tears, dirt, food when you were little. It gives me comfort to see you still do it.”

Fastening the satchel, he hands it to Andrée. “Your mother will be worrying. You’d better head home. Tell her I won’t be far behind you. We have our busy Thursday afternoon ahead of us.”

Andrée smiles and feels a surge of fear, as always. Thursday afternoons are when she gives piano lessons at home. It is also the day when they receive “visitors,” other operatives, under the cover of the lessons. Also under the watchful eye of the concierge. Maurice Dupont sees all, but so far chooses not to engage with what all this activity might mean.

As Andrée leaves the shop, she flips the sign back again. Without looking around at her father, she heads out into the street. Again, a calculation. Should she retrace her steps with a different bag? She decides to follow her instincts. Always the best way.

This time her walk through the park is slower as she takes in what she had ignored only a few moments ago: the beauty of mother nature in winter. Stripped of color and foliage, each tree, each plant, rests, nurturing itself in preparation for a new life in a few months. Stepping off the path, Andrée reaches out and strokes a nearby tree.

She peers closer, smiling at a carving made by an unknown boy or girl. A roughly shaped heart surrounds four initials. With a gloved finger, she traces the letters and offers up a silent prayer.

I hope whoever you are and wherever you are, you are together and safe.

Looking up at the bare branches, she pleads: Help me to learn from you, have your strength to survive the weeks and months ahead. Teach me how to nurture my inner self so I can protect those I love and present a life reborn when this war is over.

The wind rattles the branches, and Andrée takes this as a sign. The tree will survive the winter ahead to be here for her whenever needed.

Chapter Four

The knock on the door. The scream from within. One follows the other in the blink of an eye.

It’s just after lunch. Louis has returned safely from the bookshop, bringing with him the rest of Joséphine’s belongings. The little girl woke briefly midmorning, Tina tells them, and ate the tiny crust of baguette and drank some milk, before going back to sleep. The three of them have eaten a hasty meal of watery soup and a small hunk of Camembert de Normandie, washed down with the remaining chicory coffee. Now they’re ready for their guests. It must be business as usual. Their fellow operatives will have to be informed of this new development—that they’re now harboring a Jewish child. What they’ll tell Joséphine they haven’t quite decided. But that’s not urgent—she’s used to being in the apartment for her lesson while other “visitors” are there.

Louis runs to the front door as Andrée hurries to the spare bedroom, where she had checked on Joséphine only a few minutes earlier.

Andrée finds the girl sitting on the edge of the bed, crying. Gathering her in her arms, she holds her, rocking her gently until her sobs subside.

“They’re back. Don’t let them take me. I promised Maman not to let them take me,” she hiccups.

“You’re safe, little one. You’re with me. I won’t let anyone take you.”

“I heard them banging on the door. They’re here.”

“No, no, ma petite. It’s just someone coming to visit us. A friend.”

Meanwhile, Louis opens the door to a man standing in the doorway, not taking a step inside. Hearing Joséphine’s anguish, he looks alarmed. What if one of the neighbors steps out to see what’s going on? Should he leave now, while he still can?

“Please, Félix, come inside. I’ll explain. There, she’s stopped. Andrée is with her,” Louis tells him.

Félix steps inside, ducking his head slightly as he enters—a young man not yet thirty, with the eager, slightly unfinished look of someone still growing into himself. The son of a wealthy family, he has the good clothes and easy manners of his background, but there is something restless beneath his surface, a hunger for something more consequential than the art-history textbooks piled on his desk at the Sorbonne, where he is completing a doctoral thesis.

Shortly afterward, another brief knock at the door heralds the arrival of Dancer.

Dancer moves through the doorway the way she moves through every room—with the unhurried, weightless precision of someone whose body was trained from childhood to be watched and admired. Dancer is in her early thirties, dark-eyed and quietly luminous, the poise of the Folies Bergère still etched in her movements. Marriage and motherhood have settled in her without diminishing her grace. She takes in the room in a single glance and finds her place in it immediately, the way a dancer always finds their mark.

Behind her, Agent—in his sixties, a lecturer at the Sorbonne, with wire-rimmed glasses and the slightly distracted air of a man whose mind is always three steps ahead of the conversation. He is cautious in the way that precise, intelligent people are cautious—not from timidity but from the habit of calculating consequences. He nods at Louis, takes a careful look at the room, and sits where he can see the door.

And then Cat.