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Five

Two days. Corinne had two days left before the professor came knocking on her door again, and she was going to have to get crafty. Her knuckles fell from Trinette’s door, behind which there wasn’t the slightest stir.

She hadn’t really expected her friend’s family to be back in Paris.

They had a family estate in Provence that they’d retreated to for the duration of the war.

That was why she’d recruited Trinette to her work.

Still, a part of her had hoped. Prayed. Passing her the banned book would be so much simpler than sending it to her.

Just as she’d prayed each day as she gathered in the post that there would be a book-shaped parcel with her name on it in the letter box on the ground floor of their building, something with information on German movements penciled into the margins in code.

Surely someone had learned something useful by now.

Her uncle had warned her that intelligence was a game of patience, of long periods of inaction interrupted periodically by harrowing close calls that could get them all killed. She’d assured him she could handle it.

She might have been wrong, she had to admit as she opened her box yesterday evening.

Nothing. And not even a postcard to soften the blow. All the girls were still away from Paris, and none had yet sent her any word. Nothing for her to pass along to Oncle Georges, nothing to send on to de Gaulle and the Allies, nothing to make her staying here worthwhile.

Still, she darted through the familiar alleyways since she was so near to Amalie’s flat, in the Arcade above the shops on the Champs-élysées. Evening was falling, though with the slow, sultry sun of July that took forever to give way to night. Laughter floated down the avenue.

If she closed her eyes, she could pretend it was the right sort of laughter—Parisians out enjoying their Saturday night. She could pretend that those weren’t Nazi uniforms on the men striding down the sidewalk, that the gaily clad women on their arms weren’t betraying their country.

Don’t judge what you don’t know. A whole chorus of voices clanged that wisdom in her ear. Papa’s voice. Maman’s. Oncle Georges’s. She didn’t know those women’s stories. She didn’t know why they’d responded to the flirtations that the German men would lavish on anything in a skirt.

Perhaps they took Pétain’s advice and embraced their occupiers as friends.

..but just as likely, they were desperate.

Desperate for security, desperate to escape the uncertainty of empty shops, desperate for information on what had become of brothers and lovers who had been captured on the front when Pétain had surrendered.

Still, she didn’t particularly want to know their stories right now. She wanted to find her own friends, her own family. So she darted into the rose-scented courtyard that would lead her to Amalie’s flat. A ring, a knock.

Silence.

Corinne sighed, even though she’d expected nothing less. Moving slowly now, giving the quartet of laughing people ample time to pass by, she regained the street—and nearly jumped when a figure stepped into her path.

“Sorry! I didn’t mean to startle you.” Hugo of Cartier backed up a step, hands up in apology. “I thought that was you I saw enter the courtyard. I only thought to say bon soir and see how you’re doing.”

Letting fall the hand that had flown to cover her racing heart, Corinne smiled. “No need to apologize. I think I must have expected you to be...”

He gave a solemn nod, sparing a glance over his shoulder at where the two couples were entering a restaurant.

“You are wise to be cautious. Are you in a rush?” He motioned toward the street.

“I was just on my way home. My wife will have dinner on, and our daughter is home. She is close to your age, I imagine. Twenty.” An indulgent smile overtook his mouth.

She didn’t correct him on the assumption—he must have forgotten that she’d already told him she’d lived through the last war so was clearly older than twenty.

She was too busy being torn between the thought of an evening’s company with someone other than herself and the thought that she shouldn’t impose on anyone else’s stores of food.

Hugo leaned a little closer, eyes gleaming. “One of my customers insisted upon tipping me with a very nice bottle of red this week. And another passed along a cut of meat he said he had no need of. Eh?”

Meat he had no need of? Clearly a Nazi officer, then—no Parisian had a surplus of meat, no matter how wealthy, not for the last year. And while part of her would rather spit on anything offered by a German, she was no fool. Who knew when next she’d get more than a soup bone or a single chicken leg?

Besides—one more night of only her own thoughts for company and she might go mad. Corinne smiled. “That sounds delightful. If you’re certain your family won’t mind the intrusion?”

“Of course not! They have both been complaining about the lack of friends. And Liana!” He chuckled, shaking his head as he led her along the avenue. “She is having trouble with her beau, I think, though she keeps insisting Michel is nothing but a friend.”

He offered his elbow, and she tucked her hand into its crook.

Such a simple action, but it made years fall away.

She was strolling down this street with Papa, on her very first trip to Paris.

He had Maman on one arm, Corinne on the other, and he had this way of holding himself.

..no one ever looked at Pierre Bastien and thought he didn’t belong on the poshest streets in Paris.

He’d made her feel like she could belong here too.

Like she could have any dream she wished for.

He’d made her believe that miracles could happen, that anything could become reality if you believed.

He’d lived, after all. When he should have died. He had ten good years with them, when the physicians had insisted he wouldn’t last six months.

And he’d made her feel, with that simple offered elbow, like... someone . Someone who mattered. Someone who could make a difference. Someone who could dare to dream.

Strange how this near-stranger could make her feel the same way just by inviting her home to meet his family.

She cleared her throat as they strolled along, after Hugo indicated that they’d catch the nearest Métro. “Tell me about your daughter. Is she your only child?”

“No, no,” Hugo said with a laugh. “Just the only one still in Paris. We have five children, but the older four have all moved away. Liana fled before the bombardment, upon her mother’s insistence—stayed with Gigi, our oldest, for a few weeks.

But she couldn’t handle the quiet of the countryside, she said.

So back she came. I shouldn’t have been relieved.

” He sent her another twinkling smile. “But I confess I was. The flat was so quiet without her. We’d been dreading her admitting she was in love with Michel, that they would marry, that she too would leave us. ”

She couldn’t exactly assure him that his youngest wouldn’t soon spread her wings and fly the nest—it was what children did, after all. So she grinned. “My mother constantly teases that I’ll be home forever, that there’s no boy in Paris good enough to catch my eye.”

That much might be true. Her bar was set rather high, after all. Papa’s fault. When she’d seen what true, selfless love looked like, how a gentleman should treat his wife, she couldn’t settle for anything less.

Hugo chuckled and patted her hand. “Too bad our boys are married already. Although I have a nephew...”

She cut him off with a laugh. “I did not accept your invitation so you could play matchmaker, monsieur .” Even if it felt so deliciously normal to talk of such things.

Eligible nephews, married sons, picky daughters—conversations of years gone by. Things they spoke of before all talk turned to refugees, invaders, and surrender. War. What a wretched thing.

They paused at the corner to wait for a break in traffic, lights from the restaurant beside them drawing her eye.

When night fell, the lights would all vanish behind thick blackout curtains she could see on the side of each windowpane, and the streetlights would be barely glowing behind their stifling blue paper.

For now, though, with summer night still hours away, the glass sparkled clear and bright, giving a full view inside. ..to tables filled with Nazis.

Officers, mostly. Groups of men crowded around petite tables that seemed too small for them.

Other tables where half the seats were taken by Parisiennes with red lips and blank eyes and expensive dresses from last season.

Waiters bustling about with tight lips and chilled champagne and half-full plates.

Her throat went tight. She wasn’t hungry , not yet.

Not like she remembered being as a child.

Not like she’d probably be come winter—the ignored rationing of last year was already being reworked by their occupiers.

Everywhere she went, Corinne heard whispers about how it wouldn’t just be meat, sugar, and alcohol that were restricted soon.

It would be everything. Bread. Pasta. Rice.

There was talk of ration tickets and assigned grocers.

Talk. Perhaps it was just talk. They could pray so. But even if the rumors were unfounded, waste was unthinkable already. There simply weren’t shipments of food coming in from the country like there used to be—it was all being used by the Germans, sent back to their families.

She hoped the kitchen staff boxed up all that uneaten food and took it home with them.

Hugo must have noted the same thing, given the tsk ing sound he made. “Some people have no manners.” Manners? “Though I suppose you’re accustomed to being stared at—even so, it’s rude.”

Stared at? Her eyes left the waiter and his tray and needed no search to fly straight to the man who was looking at her.