“Wait for what?”

“For morning to come.” The station was quiet, but Eva and her mother weren’t the only ones who would need to spend the night on its hard wooden benches. More than half of the other passengers who had arrived on the train were also carving out corners of the platform, laying their heads on valises and using coats as makeshift blankets, though the air was warm. “Try to sleep, Mamusia. I’ll keep an eye out for trouble.”

* * *

It was late afternoon the next day by the time Eva and her mother finally boarded a bus to Aurignon. The journey took an hour and a half through streets lined with old stone houses that gave way to verdant forests and farmland.

Aurignon sat surrounded by dense pines at the top of a hill, and as the bus rumbled into the town, the engine straining with the climb, Eva could just make out the shadows of a stout mountain range to the west. She pressed her forehead to the glass and stared at the fog-cloaked slopes until the bus turned a corner and came to a slow, squealing stop in a small square surrounded by short, boxy stone buildings.

“Aurignon!” the driver announced to the half-dozen people on the bus. “End of the line!”

Slowly, the passengers stood, gathering bags and shuffling toward the door. Eva and her mother exited last, and it wasn’t until the bus was pulling away that Eva finally relaxed enough to gaze around and take in their new surroundings. They’d really made it.

Aurignon looked nothing like Paris, or indeed like anyplace Eva had been. When she was small, her parents had taken her on a few trips north to the Breton coast, where sea air swept the faces of wooden buildings, turning them gray as the wings of a dove. They had even ventured a handful of times an hour or so beyond Paris, where small houses dotted endless pastures threaded with streams, and the towns themselves were small, quaint, and orderly.

This town was more condensed, structures with narrow windows crowded together in a way that looked almost haphazard, as if they had started in neat rows but the earth had shrugged them off as it rose toward the sky. Stone paths meandered up the hill, and some of the roads that led away from the town square looked too narrow for even a single car. At the crest of the incline sat a small stone church with stained glass windows and a simple wooden cross above the front entrance.

The thing that stood out most to Eva was how alive the town felt, though only a handful of people hurried through the square. In Paris, since the Germans had come, people walked around clad in gray and black, heads down, as if trying to blend in with the buildings around them. Colors had leached from the landscape; in many places, the plants and flowers that had once thrived and brought the city to life had wilted and disappeared.

But here, window boxes overflowed with peppermint, chervil, and geraniums of pink, lilac, and white, while ivy crept cheerfully up the walls of stone buildings that looked as if they’d been here since long before the French Revolution. Clothes dried on lines strung across wooden balconies, and even the church overlooking the small town seemed to glow, the lights inside illuminating the colorful windows. The town square was anchored by a stone fountain featuring a bearded man with a cross in one hand and a pitcher of water in the other. Water gurgled cheerfully around the statue’s feet. This was a town whose heart hadn’t yet been trampled, and for a few seconds, Eva didn’t know what to make of it.

“What is this place?” Mamusia whispered, and Eva exchanged tentative smiles with her mother for the first time since her father had been taken. She felt tears of gratitude prickling at the back of her eyes; for a few seconds, things felt almost normal.

Eva swallowed the lump in her throat. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

“It reminds me of the village where I grew up.” Mamusia breathed in deeply and closed her eyes. “The fresh air of the countryside. I had almost forgotten.”

Eva took a deep breath, too, the faintest scents of primrose, jasmine, and pine lingering just beyond reach. When she opened her eyes, there were two little girls staring at her, each of them clasping their mothers’ hands as they hurried by. She quickly gathered herself. They were out of Paris, but they weren’t out of the woods; they were traveling on false documents and needed to find a place to stay before they became even more conspicuous. “Come,” she said to her mother.

With Eva toting the suitcase and Mamusia hurrying along a step behind, they wove away from the square as if they knew where they were going. In truth, Eva felt more lost than ever, and while she forced herself to walk casually, she scanned the alleys for a sign for a boardinghouse. Surely there was something available close to the center of the small town.

But it took four more fruitless turns before, finally, a shingle hanging ahead announced the location of a pension de famille. Eva sighed in relief and surged forward, her mother following behind her.

The door was closed and locked, the curtains pulled tightly over the windows when they arrived in front of the narrow stone building a block and a half from the main square, but Eva knocked anyhow and then knocked again, more insistently, when no one came to the door. She pounded on the door a third time and was just about to give up when it swung open, revealing a short, portly woman in a dotted housedress, glaring at them. Her gray hair was spiky and wild, and her cheeks were as round and red as tomatoes.

“Well?” the woman demanded by way of greeting, her eyes blazing as she looked back and forth from Eva to Mamusia. “Which one of you was making such a racket?”

“Um, madame, hello,” Eva said uncertainly, forcing a smile as the woman turned on her, her nostrils flaring. In that instant, she looked just like a wild boar. “We—we were looking for a boardinghouse with a vacancy.”

Some of the indignance seemed to drain from the woman, but she didn’t budge. “And you think you can just show up here, demanding a room?”

Eva looked at the pension de famille sign and then back at the woman. “Well, this is a boardinghouse, so…”

The woman’s lips twitched slightly, and Eva wasn’t sure whether she was fighting back a laugh or a growl. “And at this hour? What kind of people arrive so late? It’s nearly nightfall!”

“We just stepped off a bus after a very long journey.”

“A journey? From where?”

“Paris.”

The woman’s eyes narrowed, and she crossed her arms. “And what is your business in Aurignon?”

“Um…” Eva trailed off, thrown by the rapid-fire questions. She hadn’t expected the inquisition.

“We are secretaries, here to visit my sister, who lives nearby,” Mamusia said calmly beside her. “But she has three children and lives in a very small apartment, so there’s no space for us.” Eva blinked at her and tried to cover her astonishment. It was exactly what Eva had insisted she memorize, but she would have sworn her mother wasn’t listening. “Now, if you don’t have a room available, we are happy to go elsewhere.”

The woman stared at Mamusia before her lips twitched into a small smile, but her gaze remained suspicious. “I hear an accent, madame. You are not French.”

Eva’s mother didn’t say anything for a few seconds, and in the silence, Eva prayed that her mother wouldn’t get this detail wrong; a slipup here might make the woman summon the authorities, and then the game would be up. “My mother is—” she began.

“Russian,” her mother said firmly, and Eva breathed a sigh of relief. “I left Russia in 1917 in the wake of the Russian Revolution and married here in France. My daughter, Ev—” She hesitated and corrected herself firmly. “—Colette was born here in France a few years later.”

“Russian,” the woman repeated.

“A white émigrée,” Mamusia clarified with confidence.

“You and your daughter Ev-Colette.” The woman smirked, but her eyes were no longer as angry.

“Just Colette,” Eva said nervously.

“I see,” the woman said. She stared at them, but still she didn’t move. “Prekrasnyy vecher, ne pravda li?” she said, smiling sweetly at Mamusia.

Eva froze. The woman spoke Russian? What were the odds?

But Mamusia didn’t waver. “Da,” she said confidently.

The woman’s eyes narrowed. “Vy priexali suda so svoyey docher’yu?”

Eva forced herself to smile politely as she glanced at her mother out of the corner of her eye.

“Da,” Mamusia answered a bit less certainly.

“Mmmm,” the woman said. “Vy na samom dele ne russkaya, ne tak li? Vy moshennitsa?”

This time, Mamusia looked completely lost. “Da?” she ventured.

Eva held her breath as the woman stared for a long time at Mamusia. “Very well, madame. You and your daughter, just Colette, should come inside before it’s dark. We may be in Free France, but it would be a mistake to believe we’re actually free.” With that, she whirled on her heel and stomped heavily into the boardinghouse.