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Colette hurried along the Boulevard Raspail beside her father, doing her best to keep her head down and her mouth shut.

“I don’t want to hear a word from you until we’re home,” he’d growled as he tugged her away from the Cherche-Midi prison, where Mum was still being held. The two of them had been unceremoniously released just before noon.

“But what about Mum?” she had asked, already knowing the answer. Tears slid down her cheeks as she struggled to glance over her shoulder.

Her father responded by yanking on her arm so hard it felt as if it might just pop free of her socket. “Don’t look back.”

She did her best to keep up with him as he tightened his viselike grip on her hand and pulled her along. “Please slow down.”

“Quiet, I said.”

“What about Liliane?” she asked as they turned the final corner onto their street. “How will we find her?”

“I don’t know,” Papa spat. “I don’t know, Colette, all right?”

“Maybe she’s already come back,” Colette ventured.

But when they entered through their unlocked front door, their apartment was still and dark, a table overturned, a chair leaning haphazardly against a window, no sign of life.

The Germans had pawed through everything, emptying drawers, overturning furniture, ripping even their mattresses apart.

It looked like a wasteland. “Liliane?” Colette called out when her father remained mute, and when there was no answer, she cried her sister’s name a bit more loudly. “Liliane!”

She hurried into the bedroom they shared and found it as still and dark as the parlor. “Liliane?” she asked once more into the silence, but she already knew that her sister wasn’t there.

Her father was still standing in the parlor, just where she’d left him, when she ran back into the room. “Papa, we must find her.” She couldn’t keep the tremor out of her voice.

There was a knock then on the door, startling them both. “Liliane!” Colette cried, already racing for the door, but her father grabbed her and held her back.

“Wait,” he said. He looked through the peephole and then opened the door, revealing Madame Nadaud, the building’s concierge.

Madame Nadaud was perfectly suited for the job of looking after the building, for she was a snoop who always knew everyone else’s business.

Usually, the way her gaze followed Colette and Liliane with suspicion was an annoyance, but today, Colette was profoundly grateful to see her, for if anyone knew where Liliane was, it would be the nosy Madame Nadaud.

“Madame!” she said before either of the adults could speak. “Is Liliane with you?”

Madame Nadaud opened and closed her mouth without a sound before turning to say something soft and indecipherable to Colette’s father, whose face drained of color.

He glanced at Colette and then, with a frown, said to Madame Nadaud, “Perhaps we should speak in the hall.”

“Do you know where my sister is?” Colette demanded, ignoring her father.

Madame Nadaud looked at Papa, who hesitated, then nodded and turned away. Madame Nadaud regarded Colette, the gleam in her eyes belying the carefully arranged false compassion plastered across her face. “My dear,” she said, “I’m afraid your sister is gone.”

Colette shook her head, not understanding, as Papa let out a low moan. “What do you mean, gone ?”

Madame Nadaud looked once again to Colette’s father, but his head was in his hands; he was no help.

“No,” Colette whispered, a thick panic rising in her throat as understanding settled over her.

When Madame Nadaud spoke again, her words were directed to Papa. “There was a body found in the river. A child.”

“No. No, no, no,” he said. “It couldn’t be her.”

“Yes,” Madame Nadaud said, sounding just a shade too satisfied to be relaying the worst news possible. “At first we assumed that it was just another Jew, thrown to her death.”

Even through her grief, Colette felt a flash of white-hot rage toward Madame Nadaud for the casual disdain in her words. She couldn’t protest, though, because she needed to hear what Madame Nadaud was about to say. She had the strange sense of the walls closing in around them.

“But it wasn’t a Jew,” Madame Nadaud continued excitedly, her faux sympathy nudged aside now by her eagerness to deliver gossip. “I saw the body myself, you see. I recognized her instantly.”

“No, it isn’t possible,” Colette said.

“Oh, but I’m afraid it is, dear,” Madame Nadaud said. “She was wearing a nightgown just like the one you have on now.”

Colette looked down at her filthy blue nightgown, which she’d been wearing when the Germans dragged them off two nights ago. “But…”

“I’m quite certain. I saw her with my own two eyes. What a tragedy for our building. The neighbors are very upset. So many people to console! It’s all been very exhausting for me.”

Colette’s heart was hammering. Her palms were sweaty.

Her skin suddenly felt like it was on fire, a fire that would never be extinguished, and Colette wanted to claw her way out of her own body, to scream at the sky, to demand that God return her sister, for there had been a mistake, a terrible mistake.

Before she knew what she was doing, she had rushed at Madame Nadaud, hammering the smug woman with her fists and screaming, “No, no, no, no!” until finally, Papa pulled her off and held her tight.

“I’m very sorry,” he said to Madame Nadaud, his voice cracking as Colette wailed.

“Well, I never!” Madame Nadaud said indignantly, glaring at Colette as she brushed her clothes off. “You should really learn to control your children.”

“Child,” Papa corrected miserably.

“Pardon?” Madame Nadaud said.

“Child, not children,” he said. “Now, I have only one.”

Annabel passed three more days in Cherche-Midi, knowing she was living on borrowed time.

The German overseer spoke not another word to her, and Annabel’s tiny cell—no bigger than a broom closet—felt smaller and more claustrophobic by the hour.

The lumps of brown bread slipped through her door were hardly enough to subsist on; the small sips of water she took from the jug in her cell made her stomach rumble in protest.

At night, she could hear other prisoners whispering, and the realization that there were others around her in a similar predicament both saddened her and brought her the comfort of knowing she wasn’t alone.

On her second night in prison, after another visit from Mockel in which he’d demanded to know if she was working with an underground group and then watched with a smile as one of his men beat her so savagely that she lost both of her top front teeth, she heard the distant strains of other prisoners singing “La Marseillaise,” which made her heart ache.

She joined in softly, tears in her eyes.

Even in this terrible prison, even with all of them facing death or deportation, the spirit of France was alive and well, and when the song concluded with a hushed but enthusiastic chorus of “ Vive le general de Gaulle ,” Annabel began to sob.

There was hope for this country’s future yet, even if she wouldn’t live long enough to see it. As long as there were men and women willing to risk their reputations, their safety, their lives for what was right, there was the promise of a better tomorrow for her daughters.

“ Notre France vivra ,” the other prisoners chanted each night at seven o’clock, three times over, and on the third night, Annabel joined in with the refrain. Our France will live. The words were true; Annabel could feel it in her bones.

She could no longer sleep, and at night, she closed her eyes and imagined Colette, Liliane, and Roger safe and well, perhaps on their way out of Paris.

They would make it through the war. They would survive losing her.

They would understand one day why it had been impossible for her to sit idly by while evil seeped into Paris.

Her girls would grow into adults, and they’d become the kind of women who stood up for others, too. She was sure of it.

On the fourth morning, two Gestapo came for her, and she knew just from looking at the younger one’s averted eyes that this was the end.

Mockel would have more questions for her, she would again refuse to answer, and he would decide that since he wasn’t going to get the bracelets back, he might as well take her life.

Later, as Mockel’s henchmen beat Annabel, the world went blurry before her, and she felt her life slipping through her fingers like sand from a cracked hourglass. She had done what she thought was right, but for the first time, she understood that the price was too high.

She had made a mistake in thinking she could reclaim her friend’s dignity by stealing back her jewels.

Still, she knew that having the bracelets back would restore a piece of Hélène Rosman when she came home.

She closed her eyes now and tried to find solace in imagining how Hélène’s face would look when Colette and Liliane reunited her with the jewels hidden away in the linings of their gowns.

She had to believe that this part of the story, at least, would have a happy ending.

“I told you that you would regret this,” Mockel said at one point, swimming into view. The world had gone hazy; she knew many of her bones had been broken; her mouth was full of blood, and the ringing in her ears made him sound very far away.

“I regret nothing,” she replied, but she wasn’t certain Mockel could understand her, for her teeth were cracked, her jaw broken beyond all possibility of repair. “ Je ne regrette rien .”

“Finish her,” Mockel said. She could hear his footsteps receding, and the beating began again.

She closed her eyes, and as she released the last threads that connected her soul to her body, she saw an image in her mind, clear as day: her two daughters, old women now, holding hands under the shade of hazel trees that reminded her of the forest of her own childhood.

There were children there, too, a promise that her family’s legacy would live on.

She would never know them, but God willing, she would watch over them always.

As she moved forward into death, she was smiling, for she had seen the future, and it was beautiful.