“Have you? And does he not agree?”

Inès hesitated. It felt disloyal to be criticizing her husband’s position on the Occupation, but at home, she wasn’t allowed to have an opinion. Here, this virtual stranger seemed interested to hear what she had to say. The feeling that he cared about her thoughts was more exhilarating than she would have imagined. And it wasn’t as if she was going to say anything about Michel’s hidden guns. “He seems to be getting angrier and angrier as the months go by,” she said. “But I think that kind of anger is dangerous. Stay off the Germans’ radar, and we’ll be safe, that’s what I say.”

“You’re a wise woman, Inès,” Antoine said, and as he stared at her with respect shining in his eyes, she felt herself flushing with power.

As he began to talk again, telling her about his large apartment in the center of Reims, and his corner office with a view of the cathedral, Inès was so impressed that she hardly noticed when another drink arrived. They stayed there, sharing the details of their lives, until the brasserie closed. He kissed her gently on both cheeks, his lips lingering longer than they should have, before he bid her goodbye.

“Be careful there,” Edith warned later that night as Inès stumbled toward the bedroom that had been hers before she left to marry Michel. “Remember that a dalliance in wartime comes with stakes.”

“How could you suggest that I would do such a thing?” Inès demanded, outraged, although she had been considering exactly that. Before Antoine had departed that night, he had leaned in and whispered into Inès’s ear, asking if she’d consider meeting him again the following evening. She had hesitated, but now, with Edith already assuming she could be so easily unfaithful, something in her snapped. Edith and Michel were too virtuous and important for her, apparently. But with Antoine Picard, she’d finally felt she had some value. And it wasn’t as if she were planning to sleep with him.

And yet she had. The very next night, after another day during which she’d been left alone while Edith and Edouard disappeared on secret errands, she met Antoine at the bar of the Brasserie Moulin and agreed against her better judgment when he suggested finding somewhere else to have a meal. “I know the owner of a very nice place just around the corner from the cathedral,” he whispered in her ear. “Would you like to accompany me? It might be nice to escape your friend’s watchful gaze.” He nodded to Edith, who was across the room, glaring at him, her arms crossed over her chest.

Inès locked eyes with Edith and then looked away. Edith could never understand what it meant to be discarded, for the war had only drawn her and Edouard closer. “A meal would be lovely,” she murmured. And so they departed without another glance, though Inès could feel Edith’s eyes burning into her back.

That night, Inès ate better than she had since the war had begun—four sumptuous courses at a small, dimly lit bistro called Arnaud’s—and when she’d asked Antoine how he managed to get around the ration restrictions, he’d merely laughed and said that life was too short not to break a few rules. “Besides,” he’d added with a smile, “who could blame me for wanting to impress such a beautiful woman?”

Antoine was effusive where Michel was reserved, practiced where Michel seemed like an amateur, loquacious where Michel preferred to silently brood. Instead of acting as if he were above Inès, he genuinely wanted to know what she thought of the Occupation, of the news coming from the battlefields, of the situation in which the Champenois currently found themselves. And though she knew she wasn’t as educated about current affairs as she perhaps should have been, she liked the way he listened to her when she tried to explain why she felt that people like her husband were overreacting. “You are,” he said as their coffee—real coffee—arrived, “a breath of fresh air.”

How lovely to be thought of that way, instead of as an insubstantial twig. Perhaps that was why, after a few glasses of wine and an evening of being listened to carefully, Inès finally agreed to accompany Antoine back to his apartment nearby, though she knew better. “After all,” he had said quite reasonably, “it is after curfew, and I don’t want any German soldiers harassing you. And what if you return to the brasserie and your friend is not awake to let you in? Come, you will be safe with me.”

And she had indeed felt protected as he took her arm and gently steered her toward his building on the rue Jeanne d’Arc. She’d felt sheltered as he guided her up the stairs with his hand at her elbow. And she had felt valued as he opened the door to his apartment and said, “I hope very much that you like it here, Inès.”

And then, as he closed the door behind them, his lips fell upon hers for the first time, and whether it was because of the alcohol coursing through her or the loneliness that had become her constant companion, it didn’t feel wrong. It felt exactly how it was supposed to feel with Michel, though it hadn’t in some time. Antoine was gentle at first, but then his kisses grew hungrier, and as he drank her in, pressing his body against hers, she felt desired. It was intoxicating, almost enough so to make her forget that what she was doing was so terribly wrong.

Although Michel still dutifully took her to bed once or twice a month, Inès had never felt this sort of desire from him. Even at the beginning of their marriage, their lovemaking had felt careful, cordial. Now it felt perfunctory at best, a man occasionally servicing his wife in the polite manner that was expected. He was the only man she’d ever been with, and until that very moment, she’d felt a dismayed kind of certainty that intimacy would always feel like that.