“That sounds pretty frustrating.”

“It is,” I sigh, and now dressed in his pajamas, Wade approaches the bed and sits up beside me. He turns me slightly, and I shift to give him access to rub my shoulders. The pressure and the kneading feel amazing, but just as I start to relax, he drops a gentle but lingering kiss against my neck.

There’s a subtext in that kiss—an offer and a request, and it irritates me to my very bones. Seriously? He thinks I’m in the mood for sex after the day I’ve had?

I try to maneuver subtly out of his way and keep talking as if I didn’t notice the kiss.

“I honestly don’t know what we would have done if it wasn’t for Eddie’s AAC app. Her right hand doesn’t seem to be working the way it should—I don’t think she can write.”

“Uh-uh.”

“The thing is, what could she possibly want me to find out? She lived an entire life with Pa, what question did she never think to ask him? After seventy-plus years with someone, how can they still have secrets from you?”

There’s a moment of silence as my husband ponders this, then he says cautiously, “You have secrets from me and we’ve been together for well over a decade.”

“I don’t have secrets from you,” I say stiffly. Wade sighs and drops back to sink into his pillows. I turn around and frown at him. “I don’t.”

“You’re angry at me all of the time, and most of the time I have no idea why.”

“Seriously, Wade? You have no idea why?”

He raises his eyebrows at me.

“Go on,” he says, taunting me. “Get it off your chest. You’re obviously wanting to vent. What is it today? I’m a shit father? I’m a shit husband? I work too much? I don’t understand how hard your life is? I don’t get what it’s like to sacrifice your career?”

I glare at him, then I stand, pick up my pillow and head for the door.

“Go on, Alice,” he calls after me, his tone flat. “Run away and feel sorry for yourself because Big Bad Wade tried to make you have an adult conversation.”

“You asshole,” I say, and I turn back to him from the doorway and scowl at him through my tears. “She’s going to die, Wade. Babcia is going to die and I don’t know how to help her and you pick today to try to address the problems in our marriage?”

I see the brief flash of remorse cross his face as I slam the door and walk to Eddie’s room. My son is curled up in the corner of his bed, but the duvet is on the floor beside him. It’s weighted and to me, uncomfortably heavy, but the pressure helps keep Eddie calm, although it also tends to slip off the bed when he’s restless. I lift the duvet over his body and tuck him in, then reach under the bed and withdraw the trundle mattress.

It’s already made up, because I end up in here pretty often. Usually I come in here to help Eddie sleep, but tonight, it’s for me. Maybe Wade is right. Maybe I am running away, but all I know is, I need comfort from him tonight and not demands, and if I can’t get those things, I’ll settle for space instead.

CHAPTER 11

Alina

Since the invasion, the Nazis had been executing any citizen who provided Jews with material assistance—but when this failed to deter some people, they broadened the decree. Now they would execute the family of such a person—women and children included. For a crime as innocent as handing a Jewish person a glass of water, an entire family would now be slaughtered.

We learned about this new ruling the same way we learned about many of the struggles in Trzebinia, from Truda and Mateusz at Sunday lunch. It was snowing that day, and Emilia was wearing a black coat that was several sizes too big for her, inherited from one of the other children in their street. Her gifts of posies had stalled when the cold came, but Emilia still brought me a drawing each week, often on the back of propaganda pamphlets, because paper was increasingly difficult for Mateusz and Truda to come by.

That week, she’d given me an artwork in charcoal, a shadowy image of a rose missing many of its petals. I had a pile of such pictures in my room now, the motifs increasingly dark as the world around us was drained of light. Now Emilia drew in charcoal all the time, and she drew flowers in various states of death and, occasionally, sharp, bewildering abstracts. I still accepted each gift with a surprised smile, and she always looked so happy to have pleased me. The moodiness of her pictures concerned me, but I kept them all—I had a neat pile in the drawer with my precious ring.

That day, the conversation at lunch was focused all around that new punishment for assisting Jews. Truda was sullen in her sadness, but Mateusz was visibly shaking in frustration.

“It’s just hopeless,” Truda said miserably. “Every time I think it can’t get any worse, they find new depths of cruelty.”

“This will go a long way to discouraging those who are in the business of helping the Jews in hiding,” Father murmured, and his gaze flicked briefly to me. “People are noble, but when you threaten someone’s children...the very idea can make even the bravest man rethink heroic efforts.”

“Why do the Nazis hate the Jews so much?” Emilia blurted in her usual fashion. Everyone stared at her, searching for a way to respond, until she slumped a little. “Why do they hate us so much? What did we ever do to them?”

She was growing up before my eyes, each week a little less innocent than the last. She was a little shy of nine years old, but Emilia sometimes seemed more grown-up than I felt.

“Hitler wants land and power, and it is much easier to convince an army to die for you when you have an enemy to fight,” Father said, quite gently. “And the Jews make for an easy enemy, because people will always hate what is different.”

“Some people will help the Jews regardless,” Mama said suddenly. I felt as though she was trying to reassure us somehow. “Some will be undeterred by any punishment. Some will help them no matter what those pigs threaten us with.”

“And some are making so much gold from hiding Jews that even the threat of death to their families will not deter them,” Mateusz sighed. This was the first I’d heard of such an arrangement, and I was shocked.

“Who would do such a thing?”

“They are the worst of our countrymen, Alina, those who profit from the suffering of the innocent,” Mateusz said, suddenly scowling. “They are little more than pigs, just as the Nazis are.”

“Evil is closer to home than you think,” Mama murmured under her breath as she rose to clear her plate. “That’s why we trust no one outside of this family.”

There was no mistaking the undertone as she said it—my mother was implying something. I waited for someone to elaborate, but instead, my father shot my mother an exasperated glare.