They are gone, Josie. It’s all gone—even the house, even their things. I left and they were fine and it didn’t occur to me for a minute that might change while I was away. My family was my whole world, and I have nothing at all left of them.
“I know next to nothing about your family, you know,” he said. “Only that your mother lived in Paris until just before the invasion, and now she lives in London. Why don’t you ever talk about her?”
“We’re not supposed to talk about—”
“Josie,” he interrupted me, his tone almost as sharp as I’d ever heard it. “You already knew everything about me when you arrived here. If you don’t want to talk to me about your family, you don’t have to, but at least be honest about it.”
“It’s just me and Maman. And it’s not that I don’t want to tell you about her,” I whispered. “We were once close, but that’s changed in the last few years, and we parted on bad terms the morning before I came here.”
Over the course of the awful week since the bombing, I’d wished so fervently that she was there with me in France—a calm, skilled physician like Maman was just what we needed, not someone like me, a woman who took a nursing job once-upon-a-time because that’s all that she could find and the war had disrupted her plans to train as a translator. But now, lying in the dark beside Noah, I pictured my mother’s face and despite everything, a wave of homesickness crashed through me.
“My relationship with Maman is complicated,” I said. “That’s all. It’s just so complicated.”
“Every relationship is complicated. Even ours.”
“Ours is simple,” I protested and Noah chuckled.
“Sure it is, if you consider a relationship between two-friends-now-spies-pretending-to-be-spouses to be simple.”
“She calls me Jocelyn,” I blurted.
“Isn’t that your name?” he said, laughing in surprise.
“Yes! But when I was small—maybe five or six—there was this terrible child a few apartments down from us who used to tease me because his grandfather’s name was Joscelin. I discovered that in France Joscelin was historically a male name, so I decided that since France was to be our home, I’d have to be known as Josie. Everyone else in my life—my doctors, my nannies, the few friends I managed to make—just quietly agreed and started calling me Josie. Not Maman. To this day, I am Jocelyn to her.”
“Jocelyn is a beautiful name.”
“The name isn’t the point,” I said, sighing. “It’s her stubbornness! But…I miss her. I love her so much and I just want her to be proud of me.”
“She will be,” Noah whispered back. “One day, she’ll understand.”
“Here am I complaining to you about my complicated relationship with my mother when you lost your entire family three years ago,” I said, turning to face him at last.
“I asked, remember? I want—” He broke off suddenly. His voice was little more than a whisper when he admitted, “All I can think about these days is how short life is. We are here in such danger and every minute of the day I’m conscious that anything could happen. I just feel like we have to make the most of every minute we share. Even this week, when everything feels so out of control, just having you here beside me gives me hope for the future.”
It was the one bright spot in a week that was, in every other way, one of the worst. That was the night I realized two things: I was in love with Noah Ainsworth, and he was in love with me too.
C H A P T E R 7
ELOISE
Rouen, France
February, 1944
On my second day in Rouen, I crossed one of the temporary pontoons the Germans had constructed across the Seine, returning to the left bank of the river. I joined the queue to have my papers checked and found myself standing behind a young French family. The mother had a wide, angry scar down the back of her arm, as if she’d suffered a terrible burn. The father leaned heavily on a crutch with a foot so misshapen it hung useless and bare beneath his pant leg. The two children seemed well, except that both were so thin their cheekbones jutted out, and both stood silent and subdued in line, staring down at the water beside them.
I had no way of knowing what that family had lost—other members? Their home? But I did know that something had been taken from them. I could see it in the dullness in their eyes. I could see it in the way that they all stood, shoulders slumped and eyes downcast, as the guard stared at the father’s foot with visible revulsion.
“What happened?”
“I was born like this, sir.”
“How do you work…support your family?”
“My wife works. We are getting by.”
“A man who cannot work is of no use to his family. His community. A man who cannot work is not a man at all.” At this, the father did not speak. He simply slumped further, as though the guard’s very words were causing him to shrink. “Cover it up next time you leave your house. People should not have to see a thing like that.”
A wave of frustration and anger surged through me. The spring sun was suddenly unbearably hot on my scalp and shoulders, and the gentle sway of the pontoon beneath my feet seemed violent, even though the river was still. There were only two guards on this pontoon—the one checking papers, and the other, sitting at the edge with his rifle against his back, staring down at the river. Maybe he was taking a break, or maybe he was watching, ready to shoot anyone who tried to cross by boat. The guard closest to me, the cruel guard who mocked the disabled father, also had a rifle on his shoulder.
I’d excelled in close-combat training and I was an accurate shot. I could take that rifle and shoot both guards dead in an instant. I pictured it in my mind—how I’d disarm him, how I’d quickly aim, how I’d feel nothing but relief as I pulled that trigger, even knowing that somewhere else, probably on the riverbank, another guard would be aiming his sights at me in return. The scene playing out in my mind only sent my fury surging higher and for a moment I was nothing but a ball of pure hatred and rage, ready to explode.
Why on earth did the good people of Rouen—the good people of France and Europe—have to endure this ordeal? All because of power-mad men, so determined to foment hate and hoard resources and land that they cared not one jot for the innocent people in their way.
But in a heartbeat, I could do something small to restore some balance of justice. My mission would be over in an instant and before it even really began but oh, how good it would feel to let my rage loose on those guards.
The family shuffled forward past the guard and the next man in line stepped up, but with every fiber of my being I wanted to act before the children walked away. I wanted them to see that guard pay for humiliating their father. They could watch as he was neutralized, and then they would go to bed that night knowing that the next innocent family who came along would not be subject to such needless cruelty.
I had a million reasons to take that gun and shoot those guards, but I would not do it. I couldn’t. I had to complete my mission for the sake of the SOE and D-Day and the true liberation of the people of Europe, even for that family, so downcast and humiliated on the pontoon right in front of me.