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For the first time he lashes out. Slaps her. Hard. Her head snaps to the side and blood fills her mouth.

“Stubborn,” he says, “just like your father. That stubbornness will kill you both.”

So he’s alive, Andrée thinks. He’s alive and he’s here.

One morning they take Louis for interrogation. He’s been many times before. But this time feels different. The guards are rougher and there’s an urgency to their bullying. As if time is running out.

The Allies landed in Normandy. Everyone knows the news, Germans and prisoners alike. The liberation of France is coming, but will it come soon enough?

In the interrogation room, they ask Louis the usual questions, and he gives the same answers. I know nothing. I am nothing. Just an old man. A bookseller. Formerly an architect. Nothing more.

“Normandy,” one of the interrogators says. “You were there. We know you were there. Who sent you? What did you report? Who has the intelligence you gathered?”

Louis’s heart stutters. Somehow they know about his trip to Normandy, but they don’t know any details. They have no idea who sent him or where the maps he produced were sent. All they know is that he was there.

“I’ve never been to Normandy,” he says. “I’m a Parisian. I don’t travel.”

“Liar!”

The beating intensifies. Systematic. Professional. Designed to break bones, to rupture organs, to kill slowly.

Louis retreats into his mind, thinking of Tina, of their first stolen kiss behind a bookshop when they were seventeen. He thinks about every detail of their wedding day, the birth of Andrée. Their years of love are condensed into moments of memory.

He thinks of Josie, and prays that she is out of harm’s way, happy at the piano.

He thinks of the maps he drew and the intelligence that reached London. The invasion has taken place, and he knows he helped. In his small way, he helped liberate France.

His heart, weakened by age, by starvation, by torture, begins to fail. The pain feels distant. The voices around him fade into silence, and everything grows dim.

His last thought is of Tina. I’m sorry, my love. I’m so sorry.

And then nothing.

It is late July when they come for Tina. It is early, before breakfast and before the morning light has fully penetrated her cell.

“Get up. You’re being released.”

Released? The word doesn’t make sense to her. Since when have they released prisoners? They deport people. They kill people. They don’t release people.

“What about my husband? My daughter?”

The guard’s face shifts. Something almost like pity crosses it. “Your husband died yesterday, during interrogation. Come now or you’ll never leave this place.”

The world tilts. Dead. Louis is dead. Tina’s legs give out, and she collapses.

The guard catches her, not unkindly. His tone changes. “I’m sorry, madame. But you must come now. Get up.”

How does she get up? How does she stand? How does she breathe when Louis is dead?

But she does. Somehow she does. Because Andrée is still here. Still alive. They told her about Louis. So if Andrée was dead, they would have told her that too.

Andrée needs her to survive. To be there when, if, she’s released.

Tina stands and follows the guard through corridors, upstairs, through doors. They give her papers, her release documents. They tell her not to leave Paris, that she must report weekly to the police. They tell her she’s being watched.

She doesn’t hear any of it. Louis is dead.

They drive her to Montparnasse and drop her at the corner of rue Lecourbe and rue Cambronne. She stands there in her torn dress, her arm still in its splint, alone with her grief.