Monsieur Goujon, her father’s old boss, had helped her to find part-time work repairing typewriters, just as her father had once done, and that allowed her to pay the rent on a tiny studio apartment in the seventh arrondissement. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to return to Aurignon yet, though she knew she would someday, when she was stronger and train travel through the war-shredded country had been restored. She had to know if Père Clément had survived, whether Madame Noirot, Madame Travere, and Madame Trintignant had made it through the war. She knew in her heart that the answer was probably no, but she couldn’t bear to face the reality yet. As long as she waited in Paris, she could imagine them all alive and well. Besides, she had said she would meet Rémy here. Leaving, even for a few days, would be like admitting he was gone for good.

In the spring, tattered and emaciated Jews who had spent the war in the concentration camps to the east had begun to return. Those who had lost family members peered into the faces of these walking skeletons, struggling to find the people they were so sure they’d never see again. Sometimes, there were joyous reunions. Mostly, though, the survivors returned to find that everyone they loved had perished and that their reward for enduring hell was a renewed sense of loss and despair.

When the H?tel Lutetia began processing refugees, there was some hope. The Red Cross set up there, and they kept careful lists of the former prisoners and those who were seeking them. Everyone who survived was given food, a temporary place to stay, two thousand francs, and a coupon for a new suit. Eva had posted a precious photograph of her father, and each day, she turned up holding a sign with his name on it, hoping that someone would be able to give her an answer about his fate. She knew he was dead; she could feel it in her bones. But she needed someone to say the words so she could officially close that chapter of her life. Hope was a dangerous thief, stealing her todays for a tomorrow that would never come.

Hundreds of people streamed through the front doors of the hotel each day, and Eva peered into all their faces, grew numb to their chorus of tears and the scent of the blood dried into their prison-striped clothes. She couldn’t stop coming, though, not without an answer.

And then, on the fourth of June, she finally got one. She was wearily searching the eyes of the incoming refugees when someone said her name in a voice she recognized, but only barely. Her heart skipped, and when she turned, she was staring into the face of a man who couldn’t have weighed more than fifty kilos. His cheeks looked sunken and carved out of bone; his hair had gone gray, and his beard was patchy. But she recognized him instantly. “Tatu??” she whispered, too afraid to touch him for fear that he was an illusion, that he would dissipate before her eyes.

“Is it really you, s?oneczko?” he asked, his voice a raspy echo of what it had once been.

She could only nod, and when he pulled her into his arms, his body felt fragile and unfamiliar, but the strength of his love felt like coming home. She sobbed into his shoulder, and he into hers. When they finally pulled away, she found the father she had once known in his wise, brown eyes.

“And your mother?” he asked her. “Where is your mother?”

“Oh, Tatu?.” She began to cry again. “She died. In the early winter of 1944.”

His eyes filled. “I felt it, you know. I will mourn her, Eva, but I will forever thank God that you survived.”

“I’m—I’m so sorry, Tatu?. I wish she had been the one to live, not me.”

“Oh, s?oneczko, God has a plan for you. For all of us.” Tatu? wiped her tears away. “We must always keep moving forward.”

* * *

It took Eva a week to tell Tatu? what had happened to her mother, and when he cried and told her it was not her fault, she couldn’t bring herself to believe him, even when he insisted that Mamusia must have been so proud of her. “All she wanted for you was a happy life,” Tatu? said. “She would be so glad that you survived.”

“Tatu?, I brought her only disappointment.”

“That’s not true, Eva.”

“It is.”

He was quiet as she told him the story of Rémy, of how she had fallen in love with him despite her mother’s objections, how Mamusia had been furious about it and about so many of the other choices Eva had made. “I failed her, Tatu?,” she concluded miserably. “If I had listened, maybe she would still be alive.”

“If you had listened, s?oneczko, you’d be dead, too, for you would have followed her advice right into Joseph Pelletier’s arms.” His expression was grave. “Just because she was your mother didn’t mean she was right.”

“But if I had honored her…”

“You do honor her—and me—every day by being the kind of person we raised you to be.”

Eva covered her face with her hands, and Tatu? gently rubbed her back.

“This Rémy, do you still love him?” he asked after a moment.

“I’m certain he’s dead by now, Tatu?.”

“That’s what you thought about me, too, isn’t it? And here I am.” He paused. “You know, your mother’s parents did not want her to marry me.”

Eva looked up. “They didn’t?”

He smiled. “They thought I was too poor, that I could never give her a good life. They wanted her to marry a man named Szymon Lozinski, the son of a doctor. This Lozinski was a cruel man, though, and marrying him would have broken your mother’s heart. I like to think that for the years I had with her, I made her happy.”

“You did, Tatu?. You did.”

He smiled. “My point is that every parent wants what is best for his or her child. But we are all guilty of seeing things through the lens of our own lives. We forget sometimes that it is your life to live.”

“What about Rémy’s religion, though? Mamusia always said that to love him would be to betray the Jewish faith, especially at a time when we are being wiped from the earth.”

“You are betraying nothing if you follow your heart,” Tatu? said firmly. “Deep down, you know that, too.”

When she didn’t say anything, he leaned in and whispered in her ear, “Go, Eva. Go back to Aurignon and see if anyone there knows what became of him. It is the only way you’ll have peace—and we all deserve that.”

“Will you come with me, Tatu??”

“No, Eva, I cannot.” He shivered. “I can’t imagine being on another train. But you go. I will be here waiting for you when you return.”

* * *

When Eva got off the bus a week later in Aurignon, it looked just as it had that summer day in 1942 when she and her mother had first arrived. The flowers were in bloom, their perfume coloring the air, and the streets were alive with honeyed sunlight and the scent of pine. Eva closed her eyes for a minute and breathed in, trying to imagine Mamusia standing beside her, but it was no use. Her mother was dust in the wind, long gone.

The église Saint-Alban looked just as she remembered it, though it had gotten a fresh coat of paint since she had last been there, and the trees outside had grown, arching over the entrance like a canopy of welcome. The sun trickled in as Eva approached the front door.

Inside, the church was silent, but the familiar statue of Jesus on the cross was just where she remembered. “Hello there,” she whispered, and it felt like greeting an old friend. The pews had been restored, the church repainted and refurbished, as if all the things that had happened here had been merely a bad dream.

She checked the confessional in the back, and the office behind the altar, but she was alone. She took a deep breath and approached the door to the secret library. She still had her key, but when she inserted it into the lock, it didn’t open. She tried again, jiggling the key, but it didn’t work. Her heart sank.

“Eva?” The voice came from behind her and she whirled around, relief washing over her. It was Père Clément, and he was staring at her as if he was dreaming. “Is it really you?” he asked.

She felt as if she, too, was seeing a ghost. He was a shell of the man he’d once been, thirty pounds lighter, his sandy hair turned gray, his frock hanging loosely from a skeletal frame. But he was here and alive, and she had to stop herself from collapsing under the weight of her relief. “Père Clément,” she whispered.

“Eva, it is you.” He came forward and pulled her into a hug. “I was sure you were dead.”

“I feared the same of you.” She breathed in the familiar scent of him, frankincense and pine. There was something else now, too, an edge of smoke, of having come through a fire. “What happened to you?”

He pulled away and gave her a small smile. “I spent some time as a guest of Germany in Poland.”

“I’m so sorry.”

He waved the words away. “But I’ve managed to return, and that is what matters. The church closed when I was gone, so I was glad to be able to repair it and open its doors once again. And what about you, Eva? You made it to Switzerland?”

She nodded and briefly told him about her return to Paris and her reunion with her father. Then, because she couldn’t bear to wait any longer, she asked him the question that had been burning a hole in her heart since that cold winter night in the shadow of Switzerland’s freedom. “And Rémy, Père Clément? What happened to him?”