“I have a long day of standing in lines ahead of me. Might as well get started,” Isabelle said. “The first in line get the best food.”

Vianne put her knitting aside and stood. Smoothing her dress (another reminder that he was in the house: neither of them came downstairs in nightdresses), she went into the kitchen and then returned with ration cards. “It’s meat today.”

Isabelle grabbed the ration cards from Vianne and left the house, plunging into the darkness of a blacked-out world.

Dawn rose as she walked, illuminating a world within a world—one that looked like Carriveau but felt entirely foreign. As she passed the airfield, a small green car with the letters POL on the rear roared past her.

Gestapo.

The airfield was already a hive of activity. She saw four guards out front—two at the newly constructed gated entrance and two at the building’s double doors. Nazi flags snapped in the early-morning breeze. Several aeroplanes stood ready for takeoff—to drop bombs on England and across Europe. Guards marched in front of red signs that read: VERBOTEN. KEEP OUT UNDER PENALTY OF DEATH.

She kept walking.

There were already four women queued up in front of the butcher’s shop when she arrived. She took her place at the back of the line.

That was when she saw a piece of chalk lying in the road, tucked in against the curb. She knew instantly how she could use it.

She glanced around, but no one was looking at her. Why would they be when there were German soldiers everywhere? Men in uniforms strode through town like peacocks, buying whatever caught their eye. Rambunctious and loud and quick to laugh. They were unfailingly polite, opening doors for women and tipping their hats, but Isabelle wasn’t fooled.

She bent down and palmed the bit of chalk, hiding it in her pocket. It felt dangerous and wonderful just having it. She tapped her foot impatiently after that, waiting for her turn.

“Good morning,” she said, offering her ration card to the butcher’s wife, a tired-looking woman with thinning hair and even thinner lips.

“Ham hocks, two pounds. That’s what is left.”

“Bones?”

“The Germans take all the good meat, M’mselle. You’re lucky, in fact. Pork is verboten for the French, don’t you know, but they don’t want the hocks. Do you want them or non?”

“I’ll take them,” someone said behind her.

“So will I!” yelled another woman.

“I’ll take them,” Isabelle said. She took the small packet, wrapped up in wrinkled paper and tied with twine.

Across the street, she heard the sound of jackboots marching on cobblestone, the rattling of sabers in scabbards, the sound of male laughter and the purring voices of the French women who warmed their beds. A trio of German soldiers sat at a bistro table not far away.

“Mademoiselle?” one of them said, waving to her. “Come have coffee with us.”

She clutched her willow basket with its paper-wrapped treasures, small and insufficient as they were, and ignored the soldiers. She slipped around the corner and into an alley that was narrow and crooked, like all such passageways in town. Entrances were slim, and from the street, they appeared to be dead ends. Locals knew how to navigate them as easily as a boatman knows a boggy river. She walked forward, unobserved. The shops in the alley had all been shut down.

A poster in the abandoned milliner’s shopwindow showed a crooked old man with a huge, hooked nose, looking greedy and evil, holding a bag of money and trailing blood and bodies behind him. She saw the word—Juif—Jew—and stopped.

She knew she should keep walking. It was just propaganda, after all, the enemy’s heavy-handed attempt to blame the Jewish people for the ills of the world, and this war.

And yet.

She glanced to her left. Not fifty feet away was rue La Grande, a main street through town; to her right was an elbow bend in the alleyway.

She reached into her pocket and pulled out her piece of chalk. When she was sure the coast was clear, she drew a huge V for victory on the poster, obliterating as much of the image as she could.

Someone grabbed her wrist so hard she gasped. Her piece of chalk fell, clattered to the cobblestones, and rolled into one of the cracks.

“Mademoiselle,” a man said, shoving her against the poster she’d just defaced, pressing her cheek into the paper so that she couldn’t see him, “do you know it is verboten to do that? And punishable by death?”

TEN

Vianne closed her eyes and thought, Hurry home, Antoine.

It was all she allowed herself, just that one small plea. How could she handle all of this—war, and Captain Beck, and Isabelle—alone?

She wanted to daydream, pretend that her world was upright instead of fallen on its side; that the closed guest room door meant nothing, that Sophie had slept with Vianne last night because they’d fallen asleep reading, that Antoine was outside on this dewy dawn morning, chopping wood for a winter that was still months away. Soon he would come in and say, Well, I am off to a day of delivering mail. Perhaps he would tell her of his latest postmark—a letter in from Africa or America—and he would spin her a romantically imagined tale to go along with it.

Instead, she returned her knitting to the basket by the divan, put on her boots, and went outside to chop wood. It would be autumn again in no time, and then winter, and the devastation of her garden by the refugees had reminded her how perilously balanced her survival was. She lifted the axe and brought it down, hard.

Grasp. Raise. Steady. Chop.

Every chop reverberated up her arms and lodged painfully in the muscles of her shoulders. Sweat squeezed from her pores, dampened her hair.

“Allow me please to do this for you.”

She froze, the axe in midair.

Beck stood nearby, dressed in his breeches and boots, with only a thin white T-shirt covering his chest. His pale cheeks were reddened from a morning shave and his blond hair was wet. Droplets fell onto his T-shirt, making a pattern of small gray sunbursts.

She felt acutely uncomfortable in her robe and work boots, with her hair pinned in curls. She lowered the axe.

“There are some things a man does around the house. You are much too fragile to chop wood.”

“I can do it.”

“Of course you can, but why should you? Go, Madame. See to your daughter. I can do this small thing for you. Otherwise my mother will beat me with a switch.”

She meant to move, but somehow she didn’t, and then he was there, pulling the axe gently out of her hand. She held on instinctively for a moment.

Their gazes met, held.

She released her hold and stepped back so quickly she stumbled. He caught her by the wrist, steadied her. Mumbling a thank-you, she turned and walked away from him, keeping her spine as straight as she could. It took all of her limited courage not to speed up. Even so, by the time she reached her door, she felt as if she’d run from Paris. She kicked free of the oversized gardening boots, saw them hit the house with a thunk and fall in a heap. The last thing she wanted was kindness from this man who had invaded her home.

She slammed the door shut behind her and went to the kitchen, where she lit the stove and put a pot of water on to boil. Then she went to the bottom of the stairs and called her daughter down to breakfast.

She had to call two more times—and then threaten—before Sophie came trudging down the stairs, her hair a mess, the look in her eyes sullen. She was wearing her sailor dress—again. In the ten months Antoine had been gone, she’d outgrown it, but she refused to stop wearing it. “I’m up,” she said, shuffling to the table, taking her seat.

Vianne placed a bowl of cornmeal mush in front of her daughter. She had splurged this morning and added a tablespoon of preserved peaches on top.