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‘I’ll do it. I’ll come. I choose you.’

His words were everything she’d longed to hear, but they weren’t real.

They were a trick of the wind. They were her heart making a fool of her head.

And even if he had changed his mind and shouted them to her at the last minute, even if he was still shouting them now, what did it matter?

Unterwald had disappeared, lost to the twists and turns of the railway track, and Pascal had disappeared with it.

Noemi slumped onto the wagon’s grime-covered slats as the train rumbled away down the line, her hand leaping instinctively to her throat. But the locket he’d given her was too dangerous to wear, and she’d left that piece of him behind too.

I can’t think about what might have been; it won’t help me.

It was all she wanted to think about, but she closed her eyes instead and forced herself to remember the last time she’d let herself fall into his arms, and the misery that moment had led to. To remember the reason why she’d leapt onto a moving goods train to escape her home town.

Because my parents have been taken and my life is in danger. And his father is at the root of it all.

That helped her to breathe easier. It allowed her to shift the focus to the father not the son, to picture his cruelty instead.

Viktor Lindiger. The man who’d unleashed hatred across their sleepy Bavarian village and destroyed her family.

The man who’d brought the swastika into their lives and turned her Jewish family into prey.

Noemi opened her eyes, but she was blind to the trees and the fields.

Instead, images of her and Pascal as they’d once been flashed past as the train ate up the miles.

Crawling and toddling and running together; making the flower-filled meadows above the village their own.

Turning their eyes to the mountains and announcing, We’re going up there, in the same breath, and then doing it.

Learning the language of the peaks until they could scale them as quickly as goats.

Until they could ski the steepest runs without blinking and traverse scree-covered slopes as if their hands could read the jagged rocks.

Learning to read each other’s thoughts too.

Becoming fearless together. Doing everything together.

Until Hitler took over our world and rewrote my place in it.

The film she’d been watching stopped racing towards its happy ending.

The screen filled instead with jackboots and uniforms and a Führer who hated Jewish girls like Noemi.

Who’d ordered his faithful disciples to round up Jewish families and confine them to camps so that the plague they supposedly carried wouldn’t spill over and pollute good German blood.

Which is where I would be if Pascal hadn’t saved me.

Noemi wrapped her arms round her knees as the train picked up speed and the memories grew muddled.

He’d helped her escape without hesitation, without any thought for himself.

There’d been love in his eyes when he’d done it; there’d been love in her heart when she’d agreed.

There’d been a moment, as they’d waited for the goods train to appear, when she’d almost weakened and begged him to leave Germany with her for a second time.

But that moment had been lost in the frantic scramble into the moving carriage, and to the wind which had whipped their promises away.

The air had swapped pine forests and cut hay for the smell of coal and engine oil while she was dreaming; the train had begun to slow down.

Noemi flexed her knees and her shoulders, belatedly checked her body for any bruising from the leap into the wagon that could hamper her on the leap out.

Any moment now, the train would pull into the goods yard and her chance of discovery would escalate.

She got up and moved as close as she dared to the open door. She’d been a climber from the moment she first set foot on a slope; now she had to behave like one. She knew how to take fear and danger and turn them into adrenaline. She knew better than to look down and imagine the worst.

I’m going to survive this. One day I’m going to come home.

She refused to dwell on home and how cruel that had already become. She refused to think about the years it could take before the war ended and the Nazis were beaten. Because they had to be beaten. Light had to come back to the world.

Home .

Everything had to live in that word. Whether she or her family would be welcome in Unterwald once the war was done was out of her hands.

Whatever Pascal became was also out of her hands, no matter whether she loved him or hated him or was lost somewhere between the two.

Dreams of a life lived with him were surely nothing but dreams now.

I might never see him again.

That thought wouldn’t help her. One day, she would come home and gather up the scattered pieces of her life, no matter how far away the road led her. But first she had to keep that life safe.

So she took a deep breath and she jumped.