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“That was it!” Daniel exclaimed. “I’d forgotten his nickname. In any case, I hope you don’t mind that I booked a hotel in our old neighborhood.”

“Mind?” Colette felt dazed. “Daniel, I couldn’t imagine anything better.”

“Good,” he said. “Perhaps we can go for a walk after we’ve had a rest, and you can show me where you used to live.”

But once they had checked into their side-by-side rooms, Colette found that she was too wired to lie down. It felt urgent, suddenly, to visit her old street, and she didn’t want to wait a moment longer.

She knocked lightly on Daniel’s door, but there was no answer. He was likely napping, and she didn’t want to wake him. Besides, as much as she enjoyed his company, this was something she needed to do by herself.

She asked for directions to the rue Pasteur at the front desk, but she found that as she exited the hotel, her feet knew the way.

Everything had changed—different pavement, different storefronts, buildings that hadn’t been here seven decades earlier—but the layout of the blocks was the same.

It felt as if Paris had simply shrugged off its old wardrobe and tried on something new, and though a part of Colette wished that everything had remained just as it once was, she was mostly glad that it hadn’t.

The past was dead and gone, and maybe that was just as well.

Change is necessary , Daniel had said that morning.

It’s the only way to pave the road for future generations.

She turned the corner onto the rue Pasteur, and suddenly, there it was, her old apartment building, the number 10 etched above the door.

She stopped in front of the building and stared for a long time, the memories washing over her.

There were wrought-iron bars over the ground-floor windows now, and as she approached to touch the windowsill furthest from the door, a sob rose up in her throat.

There had been no need for bars like this in 1942, or so they’d thought, but if they had existed then, Liliane would not have been taken.

She touched the cool metal now as tears streamed down her face.

She stood that way for a long time, barely noticing the concerned looks of passersby.

She was saying goodbye to the past, to her parents, to her sister, in her own way, which meant that the adieus were spoken only in the depths of her heart.

She said goodbye to her father and told him she forgave him for what he had become after her mother’s death.

She said goodbye to her mother and told her that she hoped she was proud of how Colette had lived her life.

And she said goodbye to Liliane and asked for her forgiveness.

“I would give anything to turn back time and to save you,” she murmured, the first words she’d spoken since arriving outside her old home.

“I’m so sorry, my sweet sister, that I failed you. ”

And then, she was done. Wiping her tears away and drawing a shaky breath, she turned and faced the building across the way.

Number 9, where she had first met Tristan, who’d lost his life at Auschwitz.

She could still remember the last time she’d seen him, the smile lighting his face, the spark in his eye.

“ Je pense à ce que ca ferait / Avoir ta main dans la mienne ,” she whispered, a line from the poem she’d written him just before he was taken away to his death. “Adieu.”

Finally, she turned to the right and let her feet lead her down to number 17, the building with the courtyard.

The ground floor had been turned into a micro-creche, a preschool, and she thought with a smile how Tristan might have liked knowing that a brand-new generation was forming their earliest memories right here.

Was the garden still beyond the front door?

She pushed against it, but unsurprisingly, it was locked.

She sighed and had just taken a step back to try to figure out what to do when a young woman bustled up with groceries, talking on a cell phone, entered a code into the keypad on the right, and pushed the door open without giving Colette a second glance.

Colette hesitated for only a second before catching the door and slipping in behind her.

Inside, the long hall opened into a small green space, just as it had all those years before.

In fact, without the intrusion of the world outside the doors—the traffic, the noises, the new storefronts, the modern cars—Colette could almost believe that she had slipped backward in time.

She floated to the wall on the left and counted eleven bricks up, five bricks across.

She took a deep breath, steeling herself for disappointment.

There wasn’t a chance that in seven decades, the wall hadn’t been repaired, was there?

But to her utter astonishment, when she jiggled the brick that had once hidden her secret correspondence, it moved .

It was wedged into the wall differently than it had been then—perhaps a settling of the building over the years, but with both hands, she found she could budge it, inch by inch, until finally, it slid free.

Carefully, Colette set the brick on the ground and then straightened to stare into the space.

Even in the shadows, she could see a yellowed slip of paper there, pressed against the back.

Had someone else found the space over the years and used it to pass messages as she and Tristan had once done so long ago?

She felt a surge of violation, but it was replaced just as quickly with a rush of guilt.

She had no claim on this hole in the wall.

And in reading someone else’s message, wasn’t she, therefore, the one trespassing on territory that wasn’t hers? Still, she couldn’t help herself.

Hand trembling, she reached inside and pulled the paper out, careful not to tear it.

As she unfolded it, she went through a rapid succession of emotions: elation because she immediately recognized the handwriting; disbelief because certainly that wasn’t possible; and then confusion, because it was dated May of 1952—a decade after Tristan had died at Auschwitz.

“ What? ” she breathed to herself, sinking down to her knees as she grasped the paper with both hands and began to read.

To my Isolde,

I am due to leave Paris tomorrow for good, and I’m not sure why I’m writing you this note. I know you will never receive it. But I cannot leave without saying goodbye.

As you may have guessed, I spent the war years in a camp.

When I finally returned to Paris in the summer of ’45, I went to your building, hoping that you would still be there.

Instead, when I described the beautiful girl with the green eyes, the concierge told me that you and your family had all lost your lives.

It nearly broke me to find your poem in the wall after receiving the terrible news.

I will keep it with me always and hold your words—and you, my dear Isolde—in my heart.

We barely knew each other, but I think that sometimes, two like souls are drawn to each other like honeysuckle to hazel, like the Tristan and Isolde of the poem. To know that your soul is no longer here leaves me forever with a hole in mine.

I will carry you with me for the rest of my days.

Forever,

Your Tristan

For a long time, Colette could not breathe.

Tristan had lived ? And he had come back for her?

A sense of dread knotted in her belly, a feeling of her whole life having unfolded differently than it was supposed to because the concierge had informed him—as her father had requested during the war—that the whole Marceau family was dead.

But why hadn’t Madame Nadaud told Colette, in the fall of 1945, that someone had come looking for her?

What might Colette’s life have been like if she and Tristan had found each other after the war?

She had spent the remainder of her youth feeling adrift and unmoored, but would he have been her anchor?

Could she have had a life with him if things had turned out differently?

It was just as likely, of course, that they would not have been meant for each other after all.

The war had changed Colette, and she could only imagine how much it must have changed him.

Who knew if they’d been truly compatible to begin with anyhow?

She’d hardly known him, and now, she had no way of finding out what had become of him after he left Paris.

But wait. She had found his name in the deportation records: Tristan Berousek, who lived on the rue Ternaux, just a short walk from Colette’s apartment.

It had to be him; Tristan was not a common French name, and both the age and location fit.

And then later, she had found the record of his death at Auschwitz.

Quickly, she pulled out her phone and looked up the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Database of Holocaust Survivor and Victim Names, to which she had directed hundreds of people over the years at the center.

The database brought together all available records from both the museum’s collections and other organizations into a comprehensive search tool, and now, with her hands shaking, she entered Tristan’s first and last name.

Had the original information about his death been wrong?

Had he survived after all? If he had, the records would almost certainly indicate that now.