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Daniel brought out the salad Colette had dressed, Millie hopped up to bring in the bread basket, and then they all sat together, chattering happily as Daniel heaped piles of meat, onions, and carrots on the plates passed down to him.

“This reminds me of dinners in our parents’ apartment in Paris,” Liliane said after they had all begun eating.

“I thought you didn’t remember much,” Colette said, holding her sister’s gaze.

Liliane smiled. “Being with you again has reawakened so many memories. They started as little flashes here and there, but they’ve become a flood. The parents who raised me tried so hard to erase who I’d been before, but it was all there, just beneath the surface, all along.”

Colette nodded, a lump in her throat. “What else have you remembered?”

“The way Papa cursed at the newspapers, sometimes, like the bad news they contained was their fault. Or that terrible turnip soup Mum used to make once a week because the shops were out of everything else.”

Colette shuddered. “It really was awful.”

Liliane chuckled. “You know what else I was thinking of just this morning? You sitting at the desk in the bedroom we shared, writing poems for the boy you loved. What was his name? I can’t remember.”

Colette smiled sadly and exchanged looks with Aviva, whose eyes were filled with tears.

In the medieval poem, Tristan and Isolde had found their way back to each other, becoming as intertwined as honeysuckle and hazel, so reliant on each other that they would die if separated.

Real life, however, had not unfolded that way.

“Tristan,” she murmured. “His name was Tristan. He disappeared on the night of the Vél’ d’Hiv roundup, and I never saw him again. ”

Suddenly, Daniel jumped to his feet, startling all of them. “Tristan?”

Colette looked up at him, hope fluttering in her chest. She hadn’t known how to broach the subject of the boy with him, but it should have occurred to her that two boys of the same general age, living in the same neighborhood, might have been acquainted.

Had the answer been in front of her all along?

“Did you know him, Daniel?” she asked, her heart thudding.

“Where did you live, Colette?” Daniel asked without answering the question.

“In the eleventh, you know that. Just as you did.”

“Yes, but on which street?”

It was an odd question, but he was obviously waiting for an answer, so she said, “On the rue Pasteur. I planned to take you there when we were in Paris, but when I went there myself, I found a note in the wall from a boy named Tristan Berousek, someone who was very special to me. I’d always believed he died in the camps, but it seems he came back, and I never knew.

That night in Paris—the night you and I were supposed to see the Eiffel Tower—I was grieving him all over again. Do you—Was he someone you knew?”

He slowly sank back down into his chair, his eyes never leaving hers.

“What is it?” she asked.

“That wasn’t his name,” he said softly. “He wasn’t Tristan Berousek.”

“What?” Colette asked, puzzled.

“Tristan. It was a pen name. A romanticization. From the poem.”

“?‘Chevrefoil,’ yes,” Colette agreed, impressed that Daniel knew it. “An old Breton lai. But what makes you think that Tristan wasn’t his real name? I found his deportation record, and all the details fit—the age, the neighborhood, everything. It has to be him.”

“It isn’t, Colette.” Daniel was looking at her, his eyes wide. “ Comme un port dans la tempête ,” he whispered after a long pause. “ Elle est mon refuge dans le conflit .”

“Daniel? How do you know those words?”

He held her gaze, his eyes brimming with tears. “What comes next, Isolde?”

“But how…?” And then she understood, and the world fell away as she looked into his eyes. “ Elle scintille et brille ,” she whispered. “ Comme tous les diamants de Paris .”

“She sparkles and shines,” Daniel said in English. “Like all the diamonds in Paris. You remembered the poem, Colette.”

“Daniel,” she breathed. “But… the name Tristan—”

“—was just a silly nom de plume. I was fifteen. I was a schoolboy with a crush. I thought I was being romantic, referring to myself as Tristan, meant for you even if the world stood in our way.” Without another word, he reached into his pocket, withdrew his wallet, and pulled out a yellowed piece of paper.

“ Je pense à ce que ca ferait ,” he read aloud.

“ Avoir ta main dans la mienne. Un jour nous traverserons ce qui nous divise. / Tu seras mon roi, et moi, ta reine. ” He drew a shaky breath.

“I think of what it would feel like / To have your hand in mine. / One day we will cross that which divides us. / You will be my king, and I, your queen.”

“But… you were gone already,” she said. “I—I left that poem for you in the wall after you had been arrested. I imagined that if you ever returned, you would find it…”

“I found it after the war,” he said. “I had seen the concierge of your building by then, Colette, and she’d told me you were dead.

I thought—I thought they were the last words I would ever have from you.

I thought of you for years, but over time, I convinced myself that it was just a youthful crush.

But it wasn’t. It was more. It was always more.

And we never had the chance to discover what it could be. ”

Colette reached for his hands, and with her sister beside her, and a room filled with family, she looked into the eyes of the final piece of the puzzle of her past. “Maybe we have that chance now,” she said.

“We do.” His eyes never left hers as tears slid down his face. “God willing, we do.”

“Perhaps the diamonds have done what they were always meant to do,” Colette said, looking first at Daniel, then at Liliane, and then at Aviva, Lucas, and Millie, who were all looking on in astonishment. “The diamonds have brought us all home.”