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Josie tucks the chocolate carefully into her pocket. “Thank you,” she calls back in English to the soldier, who gives her a thumbs-up before being swallowed by the crowd. She’ll share it with Grand-Mère. Every square. Every last crumb.

A roar goes through the crowd like a wave.

He is here.

General Charles de Gaulle, impossibly tall, impossibly composed, walks the length of the Champs-Élysées as though the liberation of Paris is simply the natural order of things restored. Behind him, the soldiers of the French Second Armored Division march in formation, their boots striking the cobblestones in a rhythm that Josie feels in her chest.

She strains on her toes to see the man who refused to surrender. The man who broadcast from London when France fell. She’s heard his voice on Louis’s hidden radio dozens of times in the dark of the apartment. And here he is, walking through the free streets of Paris.

People are screaming his name, throwing flowers and weeping. The noise is like nothing Josie has ever heard, four years of silence and fear and whispering exploding at once into pure, overwhelming joy.

And then . . .

Shots.

A crack from somewhere above. Then another. Then several at once, from a building to the right, from a rooftop further along. Snipers! Hiding in the buildings that line the avenue, firing down into the celebrating crowd.

A man a few meters from Josie drops without a sound. There one second, gone the next.

Then the screaming erupts and the crowd becomes a stampede. People panic, push through the throng, falling, getting up, running in every direction. Josie runs too. She doesn’t know where she’s going, just away from here, from the shots, away from the open avenue, toward the shelter of the buildings.

Another crack.

Something hits her from behind. An enormous weight crashing into her, driving her toward the ground. For a terrifying second she thinks she’s been shot. But there’s no pain. Just the weight of a woman, fallen across her back, driving her down onto the pavement.

“Get off me!” Josie twists, struggles. The woman doesn’t move. Can’t move.

She’s been hit. The woman who fell on Josie has been shot.

Josie wriggles free, gasping. Gets to her feet. Looks at the woman for one terrible second, a stranger, perhaps forty, her eyes open and shocked. Josie doesn’t stop; she can’t stop. Around her everyone is running and she joins them, sprinting the last meters to the nearest building, throwing herself through a doorway with a dozen others who crowd against the walls inside, breathing hard, listening to the shots outside.

Someone has their arms around her. She doesn’t know who. She doesn’t pull away.

The shooting continues for what feels like forever but is probably less than a minute. Then comes silence. Finally, the soldiers take control and the crowds begin to emerge from doorways and peer up at the rooftops.

Josie steps back out onto the boulevard. Her legs are shaking. Her palms are scraped raw from the cobblestones.

“Are you hurt?” a woman asks her.

“No. No, I don’t think so.” She looks down at herself. Her knees are bleeding through the torn fabric of her dress.

Further along the avenue, the procession has reformed. De Gaulle continues to walk, his head held high, as if the snipers were merely an inconvenience. Nothing can stop this day.

Josie straightens her dress, wipes her palms on her skirt, and joins the crowds once more.

She walks all the way to Notre-Dame, watches de Gaulle disappear inside amid an extraordinary press of people and noise. Then she follows the great wave of Parisians winding through the city, street by street, all the way back to Montparnasse.

She is still shaking slightly when she reaches rue Blomet. She can still see the man who dropped, the face of the woman who fell on her. The crack of the gunshots still ring in her ears.

But Paris is free. And she is here to tell her story.

Tina looks up the moment Josie opens the door. She takes one look at the state of her dress and bloody knees and is on her feet in an instant.

“What happened? Are you hurt? What . . . ?”

“I’m fine. I’m completely fine.” Josie collapses onto the sofa. “Sit down, Grand-Mère. I’ll tell you all about it.”

With great excitement and dramatic flair, she describes everything: the crowds, the soldiers, de Gaulle walking the Champs-Élysées as if he owned every cobblestone. The French Second Armored Division. The roaring, weeping, joyful masses of people.