From the shadow that crossed Père Clément’s face and the pain that filled his eyes, she knew the answer before he said it. “Oh, Eva, you don’t know.” He reached for her hand. “I’m so sorry, my dear. He didn’t make it.”

She had known it was true, for if he had lived, he would have come for her. But she hadn’t realized until that moment that she’d still been holding on to so much impossible hope. Her whole body went cold, and in what felt like slow motion, she collapsed to her knees, her limbs suddenly as limp as rags. She could feel the blood rushing through her veins, the tears prickling at the backs of her eyes, the air suspended in her choked lungs, the aching hole in her heart where the possibility of a future had once been. “No,” she finally whispered, and then she was drinking the air in desperate gulps, unable to control the tremors that shook her whole body as Père Clément knelt beside her and stroked her back while she sobbed into her hands. “What happened?” she asked when she could finally breathe again. “What happened to him?”

“He came back to Aurignon,” Père Clément said slowly. “I caught glimpses of him twice near the town square, but both times, he pretended not to know me. I later learned he was following a gendarme named Besnard, a man who used to worship here, a man whose children I baptized.”

Eva blinked. “I remember him.” He was the gendarme who used to stare at her, whose gaze made her uneasy, though she had tried to convince herself it was only her imagination.

Père Clément nodded and drew a deep breath. “As it turns out, Besnard had been betraying his fellow officers, the ones who were sympathetic to the French, and reporting them to the German command. He was closing in on the families of some of the maquisards. Rémy had been sent to capture him before he could do more harm.”

Eva could hardly breathe. “What happened?”

“Someone tipped Besnard off, and he was heavily armed when Rémy came for him. From what I understand, there was a fight outside the same barn where Geneviève died, and both men perished.”

Eva began to cry. “When?”

“The first week of June 1944.”

It was four months after she had fled. If she had waited longer, would she have seen Rémy once more? Could she have persuaded him not to walk into a trap? To stay with her after all? They were questions she knew would haunt her forever. “Was he… was he buried here?”

Père Clément shook his head. “The maquisards took care of their own, Eva. They came for his body before it could be desecrated by the Germans. I’m so sorry.” He hesitated and added, “I said funeral rites for him anyhow.”

“That would have meant a great deal to him, I think.” For a moment, she was silent, imagining a world without Rémy in it. It was astonishing that the sun had continued to shine, that the earth had continued to turn, as if nothing had changed. The truth that he had been gone for more than a year now seemed impossible.

“I’m very sorry, Eva. I know how much you loved him.”

“If I had said I would marry him—”

“Don’t do that,” Père Clément said, cutting her off. “The end would have been the same, my child. He still would have fought. He felt it was his duty. He died a hero of France.”

“A hero of France,” she repeated in a murmur. “And what of the others? Madame Noirot? Madame Travere?”

“Both sent east. Neither returned.”

“And Madame Trintignant? Did she survive, at least?”

He sighed. “I’m afraid she was caught at the border when she tried to escape into Switzerland. She died in prison.”

Eva shook her head. The scope of loss was almost unimaginable. She thought of Rémy, standing outside the blue barn, knowing he might be walking right into his own death. Had he died knowing she loved him? Or had he died thinking that her answer to him would always be no? “Père Clément? Did Rémy return to the secret library before he died? Did he look in the Book of Lost Names?”

Something changed in the priest’s face. “Eva, I’m afraid I don’t know.”

“Can you unlock the door for me? I need to see the book.” Suddenly it felt like the most urgent thing in the world. Had Rémy read her message? Had he left one of his own? “Please, mon Père.”

But the priest didn’t move, though the sorrow on his face deepened. “Eva, the library was looted by the Nazis right around the time Rémy lost his life. It was clear the war was lost, and they were fleeing, but they wanted to take whatever they could with them back to Germany. There were several private homes ransacked, as well, along with Madame Noirot’s bookstore, but our secret library suffered the greatest losses, perhaps because they perceived our collection of old religious texts to be very valuable.”

“Did they take our book? The Book of Lost Names?” she whispered.

He nodded slowly.

Tears filled her eyes again. It was another staggering blow. Now, not only would she never see Rémy again, but she would never know if he’d died realizing that she wanted to marry him. Nor would she have a record of the hundreds of children whose names were changed, the ones whose pasts she wanted so desperately to preserve. The loss of the book felt like a death of hope. “May I have a few moments alone in the library?” she asked.

“I changed the lock and closed it tight when I returned to Aurignon,” Père Clément said. “It’s been too painful to go inside. It made me think of you and Geneviève and Rémy and all the things we accomplished here—but also all the things we lost.”

Eva bowed her head. “That’s why I need to say goodbye.”

Père Clément nodded and led her toward the familiar room. He withdrew a key from beneath his robe, unlocked the door, and opened it for her. “I’ll be just outside,” he said, squeezing her shoulder. “Stay as long as you like.”

It took a few seconds for Eva’s eyes to adjust to the dim lighting; she hadn’t thought to ask Père Clément for a lantern. Still, sunlight spilled in narrow ribbons from the stained glass windows overhead, just as it always had, and Eva found a bit of comfort in the familiar glow.

But that was the only thing that felt the same about the room. The table where she had once worked was gone, as were the chairs that had anchored it. The shelves were nearly bare, with only a hundred or so books remaining from the thousands that had once lined the room. A fine layer of dust made everything look haunted, and as Eva ran her hands over the remaining volumes, sadness swept through her.

The Germans had taken everything of any conceivable value, leaving only newer-looking volumes behind. There were some church missals that had been printed in the 1920s, some newer Bibles, and a collection of scholarly texts with spines too ragged to be of any use to anyone. They seemed lonely on the shelves by themselves, devoid of the brothers and sisters they’d spent years with, and Eva felt a surge of grief for them that she knew was illogical.

She ran her hands over the books, saying what she knew was a final goodbye to these old friends that rested in a place she knew she’d never see again. But as she neared the end of a row of familiar Bibles, she stopped abruptly, her fingertips on the tattered spine of a volume that didn’t belong there.

She pulled it out and stared at the cover. It was an English-language edition of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, a book she had once mentioned to Rémy as they worked side by side, two months after she’d arrived in Aurignon. He had asked about her father, and she had told him about all the books that had once lined his beautiful library at home. Did you know, she had asked him, that The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was among the first novels written on a typewriter? It was one of my father’s favorite things. We had a copy, but I had to leave it behind Is it strange that it’s one of the things I miss most from home?

Slowly, she opened the front cover of the book, and her breath caught in her throat. There, on the title page, in Rémy’s scratchy handwriting, was a note.

For E: I found this in Paris. One day I’ll buy you a better copy. R

4 June 1944

She read the message once, twice, three times, searching for a meaning, a code, but the words were just words, one final gesture of kindness from a man who’d been thinking of her before he died. But had he left her a message in the Book of Lost Names, too? Or had he been in a hurry, stopping only long enough to drop off this gift? And why had he left it here if he’d known she had already fled to Switzerland? Was it because he knew she would come back if she lived through the war?