“All will be well,” he said confidently.
“I just keep thinking they might already be on their way to America if I’d gone with them the other two times.” Ava quickened her step as the docked ships came into view. The crowd swelled with travelers, their few trunks stuffed to bulging with their belongings as arrivals and departures congealed into a writhing mass.
“If I’d been there to translate,” she lamented. “If Lukas hadn’t somehow interfered.”
James stiffened. “He was there?”
Ava’s stomach slid a little lower.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t want to worry you. Apparently one day he came in and spoke with one of the clerks before Sarah and Noah were turned away.” She shook her head. “I wasn’t there.”
James took a breath as if intending to say more, but Sarah and Noah emerged from the crowd of travelers. Noah beamed at them and triumphantly lifted the ice cream in hand, but Sarah’s face was stricken.
Ava did not need to ask why.
“The USS Siboney…” Sarah’s eyes filled with tears. “It has still not arrived.”
Which meant there would be no way for it to sail out by Friday now. Ava would have to begin the process over again. She forced down the bitterness of her own disappointment. Instead, she focused on reassuring her friend she would find a way to get her and Noah to America.
And Ava would. With patience and time—both of which were now in short supply.
TWENTY-FOUR
Elaine
The days following Nicole’s death were some of the darkest Elaine had known.
Elaine did not remember how she returned to the warehouse after seeing Nicole’s tortured body, only the sensation of being wrapped in blankets and how not even the warmth of their layers could allay her uncontrollable shivering. Afterward, once she finally shook free of her fugue state, she returned to work by rote, performing motions instilled by months of repetition rather than thought.
In the past, she had been able to outwork the horrors of war, but not now, not with such terrible images branded in her mind. Whispers followed her—ones of Nicole, of what she might have given up by the persuasion of such physical pain.
“She would never have talked.” Elaine rounded on Antoine, her voice sounding foreign to her own ears after having not spoken for nearly a week.
“You can’t know that,” he said in a solemn tone, ever the realist.
“I knew Nicole,” Elaine countered. “She would never have given the Gestapo any information about us.”
“Even still,” Marcel interjected, his tone paternal, “I think it best we find a different place for you to sleep rather than have you continue to stay here.”
While the warehouse was by no means a home, it was familiar. The idea of going to another safe house with a lumpy mattress and empty walls left a hollowness ringing in Elaine’s chest. But she could not deny that the suggestion was a sound one no matter how much it filled her with dread.
Elaine was out the door of the narrow, one room apartment as soon as the curfew lifted, eager to leave the cold loneliness of it behind. The stacks of newsprint from the night before were waiting for her at the warehouse, unfinished—something she might have completed had she been able to sleep in the back bedroom as before.
When she arrived, the front door was slightly ajar. She drew upright, her senses on high alert.
Most likely someone else had already arrived before her. They all worked tirelessly through the occupation and even more so now to comply with the massive uptick of requested production. Surely someone arrived tired, their exhaustion making them careless.