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Then the snipers. The shots. The man who fell. The woman who perhaps saved Josie’s life simply by falling on her at the right moment.

Tina has gone white. Both hands pressed to her mouth. Shaking.

“Josie, ma petite, you could have been killed.”

“But I wasn’t. We agreed I’d come back and tell you all I saw, and here I am.”

Tina’s hands are trembling. Josie reaches for them.

“I’m all right, Grand-Mère, I promise. And I have something for you. A present from an American soldier.”

She reaches into her pocket.

Her hand finds nothing.

She checks the other pocket. Empty too. She shoves her hands deeper and turns the pockets inside out.

The chocolate bar is gone.

She sits for a moment, staring at her empty hands. Then she understands. When the woman fell on her. When she was driven down onto the cobblestones and wriggled free, scrabbling on hands and knees across the boulevard, it must have fallen out then. The most precious thing she was carrying, the gift she’d saved to share, the one square of sweetness in all this chaos, lying somewhere on the Champs-Élysées, trampled under the feet of a liberated people.

She looks at Tina. And then, despite herself, despite the shaking and the shock and the woman who might be dead in the street, she starts to laugh.

“What?” Tina asks, bewildered. “What’s funny?”

She can hardly get the words out. “An American soldier gave me a bar of chocolate. I was going to bring it home for us to share.” She holds up her empty hands. “And when I was knocked down by the woman who took a bullet that might have been meant for me, it must have fallen out of my pocket. It’s probably somewhere on the Champs-Élysées.”

Tina stares at her. Then she, too, begins to laugh, a broken, helpless, relieved laugh, the kind of laughter that saves you from crying.

“Only you,” Tina says, wiping her eyes. “Only you, Josie. A bullet misses you by centimeters and you’re upset about the chocolate.”

“It was for us.”

“I know, ma chérie. I know.”

They sit together in the lingering summer twilight of the liberated city, laughing and crying in equal measure. Outside, Paris still celebrates. Music and singing and shouting drift up through the open windows.

Paris is free. Louis is gone. Andrée is somewhere unknown.

But they are here, together.

The rumor is spread by whispers. From block to block and bunk to bunk and mouth to ear, so quietly that the guards can’t hear, or pretend not to.

Paris is free!

Andrée hears it from the woman in the bunk above, who heard it from a Polish woman, who heard it from a Dutch prisoner whose guard had let slip something he shouldn’t.

Liberation. The Allies entered Paris on August 25, 1944, to the ringing of church bells, after four years of silence. The next day de Gaulle walked the Champs-Élysées amid cheering, happy crowds.

She sits on her bunk and holds the words in her mind. Turns them over carefully, the way you might handle something incredibly fragile.

Paris. Free.

Around her, as the whispers spread, women begin to weep, very quietly. Crying openly is dangerous here, but the tears come anyway. From Parisian women who haven’t seen their city in months or years, from French women and those of other nations who understand what this means, and from women who have given everything, their freedom, their health, their people, for this moment.

Paris is free. Which means France is fighting back. Which means the war is turning, has turned, and could be nearly over.

Which means, someday, they might go home.