“Not long,” she said vaguely. She had lost track of the minutes. She only knew it was enough time for the last traces of Rémy to be erased. “Rémy is gone.”

“Yes,” Père Clément said, and she realized that he had already known.

“Do you know where I can find him?” Eva hesitated. “I think there are some things I need to say to him, things I should have said last night.”

Père Clément frowned. “He didn’t tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“Eva, he’s escorting some of the children today.”

“He’s—what?”

“He said he knew how close you had gotten in the past couple of months to Madame Travere’s wards, especially Anne, and he wanted to see them safely across the border.”

Eva swallowed hard. “He went because of me?”

Père Clément’s smile was gentle, and Eva had the sense, not for the first time, that he could see into her heart. “He went because he’s a good man, trying to do the right thing.”

“But he didn’t tell me.”

“Perhaps he didn’t want to worry you.”

Or maybe he had known she would try to stop him. Maybe the kiss they’d shared had been his way of saying goodbye. Is that what he’d meant when he said he couldn’t let her down? Was he afraid he wouldn’t come back? A shiver ran through her, colder than anything she’d felt from the weather outside. “The passage will be dangerous this time of year,” she said softly.

“Yes.”

“How long do you think it will take him to make it back to Aurignon?”

“Eva, I’m not sure he’s coming back,” he said after a moment. “I’m told the underground has other needs for his expertise.”

“His expertise?”

Père Clément’s eyes were filled with concern. “Before he found his way to Aurignon, he apparently worked a bit with explosives.”

“Explosives? Rémy?”

“He has a background in chemistry.”

“Of course,” Eva murmured. “The lactic acid.”

Père Clément nodded. “As I understand it, formulating explosives requires some experience with that sort of thing.”

So Rémy would be out there somewhere, blowing things up, risking his life. Would she see him again? Suddenly, she felt as if she was sinking. “But I need him,” she said weakly.

She wasn’t sure whether Père Clément truly misunderstood her meaning or had chosen to save her the embarrassment of a real answer. “You’ll be all right, Eva. In fact, the movement is sending another forger in his place to help you out for a while.”

“Another forger?” Eva looked around the room in dismay. This had been the space she had shared with Rémy. She couldn’t imagine another person here, breathing air that was supposed to be his, taking up space that wasn’t meant to be filled by anyone but him.

“In fact, I’m told she’s around your age.”

“It’s a woman?” Somehow, Eva hadn’t expected this, but why not?

Père Clément nodded. “She should be here within the month.”

Slowly, Eva reached for the papers she and Rémy had forged together last night, the ones that would allow the children safe access to Switzerland if all went according to plan. As she held them out to Père Clément, she mustered her courage. “May I come with you? To say goodbye to him?”

From the way he held her gaze, she had the feeling he could see just what was in her heart. “No, Eva, I’m afraid not. In fact, the children and the couriers are already outside the city. I’m sending someone with these documents now. It’s too dangerous to do it any other way.”

“So you won’t see Rémy, either.”

He took her hands in his. “I feel certain we’ll both see him again soon. Remember, Eva—we must have faith.”

She drew no comfort from his words, though, for she knew Catholics believed they would see each other again on the other side, once they were dead. And Père Clément had made no promises that Rémy would return to them alive. Perhaps he only meant that one day, if they all lived good lives, they would be reunited far away from here. But by then it would be too late.

Chapter Twenty

The new forger sent by the underground two weeks later was a twenty-six-year-old woman who went by the name Geneviève Marchand. Her short, wavy black bob reminded Eva instantly of the actress Marie Bell, and she had the sort of long legs and good looks that might have made her a star, too, in a different time and place. Here, though, her striking appearance only made her conspicuous, and Eva wondered how someone who looked like that was working for the Resistance, which relied largely on people capable of blending in, people like Eva herself.

She had come from an area known as the Plateau, 150 kilometers southeast of Aurignon. There, she had lived in a village where forgery was big business, and more than a thousand Jews were hidden, under the direction of a local Protestant pastor working with the Resistance. It had sounded like an exaggeration when Geneviève first mentioned it, but Père Clément had explained that the story was true. “Now that the networks are beginning to become more well organized, we are in communication with them,” he’d said. “That’s how they came to send Geneviève here. The man she trained under, a man named Plunne, has forged thousands of documents.”

It turned out that this Plunne’s methods weren’t all that dissimilar from Eva’s, though he was working on a much larger scale. It seemed that he had happened upon some of the same ideas for large-scale forgeries, including using the small copiers with the gel rollers to duplicate stamps. That meant that Geneviève fit right in immediately, and though Eva would never admit it aloud, she was better than Rémy had been, more fastidious, more careful. She sometimes caught small errors—slight misspellings or small discrepancies in details—before Eva did, and that alone was worth the price of her company. If her sharp eye saved even one person from an equally eagle-eyed German, she belonged here.

By the time the snow finally began to thaw, Geneviève had been working in the place that had once been Rémy’s for more than a month, and Rémy still hadn’t returned. Eva worried that she would start to forget him, but every morning, in those first few seconds between dreams and consciousness, she could still taste the sweet saltiness of him on her lips, could still feel the ghost of his body against hers. And then she would be awake and those sensations would be gone, and she would be reminded anew of just how alone she was.

But the longer he was gone, the more she began to wonder whether she’d been fooling herself thinking that her feelings for him could go anywhere. Even in a perfect world—a world where they weren’t at war with an enemy who wanted to murder people like her—he was still a Catholic, and she was still the Jewish daughter of parents who would never approve. If the past nine months had taught her anything, it was how deeply family should be valued and respected. Maybe her mother was right, and Eva should forget about him, try to open her mind to someone more appropriate, like Joseph. The only problem was that as much as Eva could manage to talk her head into it, she couldn’t persuade her heart that Rémy wasn’t worth loving.

Still, he had left her, hadn’t he? She knew he was out there fighting, doing good—if he was even still alive—but on the darkest nights, Eva found herself thinking he would have stayed if he’d loved her enough.

Geneviève didn’t talk much, which suited Eva just fine. And though Eva grew to trust her, she never told her about the Book of Lost Names. At the beginning, she considered it more than once, for they worked together each day, and there was no doubt that Geneviève was as dedicated to the cause as Eva. But the secret was safer if shared only with Rémy and Père Clément, so the priest agreed not to mention it in front of Geneviève, and Eva only added names to the book when the other woman wasn’t there.

On the first truly warm day of 1943, which wasn’t until late April, long after the snow and ice had melted, Eva took off from the secret library a bit early and asked her mother if she wanted to go for a walk. In Paris, she and her mother had been comme les deux doigts de la main, like two fingers of a hand, two peas in a pod. They had shared everything, and Eva had been desperate to make her proud. Here, though, everything had shifted. Her mother didn’t approve of what Eva was doing, and in order to live with herself, Eva had to pretend that she didn’t care. But she did, and though she knew the work was important, the distance between them ate at her. Now that Rémy was gone, Eva could more clearly see the gaping hole in her life where affection and loyalty had once been.