Girl in the Blue Coat (continued)

“It has changed. We have a safe place for her, right here, across the street. Mina and Judith know the theater. Why won’t you help me, Ollie?”

“I don’t understand you, Hanneke,” he snaps. “We’ve all been hoping, for the past four days, that you would help us with the resistance, with things that can actually matter for not just one person, but hundreds of people. And now here you are, telling me I have to risk the lives of all my other friends to help you? You really are—”

“What am I?” I challenge him, furious but keeping my voice down. “Crazy? Damaged?”

“I felt bad for you, Hanneke. For the fact that you had to grieve for Bas on your own. I felt so sorry for you, and I also thought you would be useful to us in the resistance. But if I had realized how bullheaded you would be, I wouldn’t have brought you to the first meeting at all.”

“Bas would help me.” It’s cruel, to compare Ollie to his brother right now, but I can’t help it. It’s true. “He would. He would wonder why we’re even still having this conversation when we know right where she is. He would say we should go and get her right now. Do you remember his party that one summer when my parents wouldn’t let me come because I was sick? He sneaked up the drainpipe just to bring me cake afterward. Bas wouldn’t be able to stand that someone had specifically asked for help with finding her, and we were ignoring it.”

“And he would be dead.”

I reel backward, staring at Ollie. “What did you just say?”

“Hanneke. Bas was a thousand good things. A million good things. But he was brash, and reckless, and he never thought before acting. That night of the party when he brought you the cake? You were happy, but he was punished. My parents were furious at how late he’d stayed out. And now? Now Bas would try to help save this girl, and the Nazis would catch him, and he would die.”

“You don’t know that,” I say.

“Don’t you think I want to help you? Don’t you know how hard it is for me to think about what might happen to that girl, all alone? I want to be like Bas all the time because he was charming and fun. But he wasn’t perfect. Someone has to be the careful one. Someone has to think, every moment of every day, of how dangerous a single slip could be.”

His hair is squashed to one side of his face; he has purple bags under his eyes. He must be exhausted. I don’t know how many miles he had to bicycle into the country to take Judith to her hiding place, and then he came straight here after. Seeing him makes me aware of how tired I am, as well. Whole worlds have happened since the last time either of us slept.

“Hanneke? Ollie?” It’s Mina, still sitting at Mr. de Vries’s desk, still holding the slides. She obviously hasn’t even been following our conversation.

Her face is frozen in horror.

“Mina? What is it?” I ask. She points to the slides in her hand, toward the last series of images that we hadn’t yet looked at. “Is Mirjam in those, too?” I go back to the desk, leaning over to see whatever she’s pointing to. “Let me see.”

“It’s not that. It’s… they’re closing down the crèche.” She hands me the magnifying glass before continuing. “Look, in this one—there are the other helpers, taking all the children into the theater. They never go in a big group like that. They’re going to close the nursery and transport the children with Mirjam.” I squint my eyes and see a parade of small children, and two of the young women I’d seen working in the nursery with Mina.

“I’m so sorry,” I say to Mina. “I know you knew them well.” But she’s shaking her head, pointing again at the slide.

“No. Look,” she says. “Look.”

I look. And I finally understand what she’s talking about. The older children from the crèche are walking into the theater. Two of the younger ones are in carriages. And one carriage in particular. The carriage holding the photographs of the brutal war and secret resistance, and everyone I have met and grown to care about in the past few days.

“They’ll find the camera in a minute,” Mina says. “The Nazis. When the carriage goes to the transit camp. And then they’ll find all of us.”

Ollie looks completely confused; he has never heard of the camera and has no idea what Mina is talking about. But I do. And I know that a few minutes ago, when we saw Mirjam in the photographs and Ollie told me that nothing had changed—he was wrong. Everything has changed.

———

Sunday

“What are we going to do?” Sanne asks for the fifth time, and for the fifth time, nobody has an answer.

Ollie flew around the city on his bicycle to gather everyone here, first to his apartment, where Willem had already left for an early class, and then to Leo, who promised to fetch Sanne and come straight to Mrs. de Vries’s. Now everyone is here but Willem and Judith, who knows more about the theater than anybody else and who can never come to another meeting again.

“I can’t believe you would be so stupid,” Leo snarls at Mina. “I had no idea you were taking pictures. We’re trying to save actual lives, and you’re flitting around with your camera? I told everyone you were too young.”

“Don’t yell at her,” Ollie warns. “Don’t yell at all.” He nods meaningfully toward the study’s closed door. Mrs. de Vries is furious that we’re all here. She hasn’t moved once from the front window, promising she’ll make us all leave immediately if she hears a noise coming from the study.

“It’s already done, Leo, okay?” Sanne says. “It’s too late to change that she did it. Now we have to figure out: What are we going to do?”

“Let’s think it through,” Ollie says. “Maybe nobody will find the camera. Mina was using it to take pictures for months, and the other volunteers in the crèche didn’t realize it. Is that a possibility?”

Mina bows her head miserably. “You know it’s not. When the transports get to the transit camps, they search everyone’s personal items—sometimes people try to sew jewelry or money inside their coats and suitcases. The guards will rip that carriage apart at the seams. And when they do…”

We all know what will happen when they do. Pictures of the resistance workers. Pictures of dozens of hidden exchanges, of children going into hiding, of innocent, innocent people.

“But how do you even know they’ll take the carriage to the station?” Sanne asks. “When people are called for transport, they’re usually allowed to bring just one suitcase apiece. Why would guards let a family bring along a carriage? Maybe it will just be left in the theater.”

“How is that any better?” Leo snaps. “Do you think the camera won’t be discovered there just as easily?”

“It’s not any better,” Sanne says defensively. “I’m just saying that we don’t know for sure that the carriage is going to be searched, or when, or by whom. We don’t even know for sure that all the children will be on this transport. I know transports usually happen in the order that prisoners arrive, but sometimes they don’t. Is there any way we can get into the theater?”

Ollie shakes his head. “They know everyone who works there, and they’re not bending any rules to let in new people now. Everything has changed since the Council members and their families are being called up.”

“What if we asked Walter?” Leo suggests. I know that Walter is the man who oversees the theater, who helps falsify papers for the children in the crèche.

Ollie’s voice is final. “No. This isn’t a resistance mission. This was us messing up. Our own idiocy. We’re not going to drag him into it until we try to fix it ourselves.”

“They are going to take the carriage to the train station,” Mina whispers. “I just know it. They never leave things behind in the theater; it’s too crowded there and they’re always looking to pack more people in. The carriage is going to the train station; you have to believe me.”

Sanne winces, then takes a deep breath and starts again. “Okay. So you are saying we would have to get the camera back, but not when it’s in the theater. We would have to get it when the transport leaves the theater, on the way to the station. And it would have to be a secret. And nobody could see us. Correct?”

“We’d be out after curfew,” Leo says. “So we’d need special papers, at least.”

“Or a disguise,” Sanne says. “A Gestapo uniform would be best—highranking enough to walk through the city after curfew without being questioned.”

“We can’t get one,” Ollie says shortly. “If we could, that plan might work. But we can’t. I know other resistance groups have stolen German uniforms to use for their operations, but we don’t know anybody who has one now, and we’re not going to be able to arrange a second secret operation to get one. Certainly not in the two days we have before the transport. Think of something else.”

“You’re all being stupid,” Mina says, shaking her head. “Of course there’s a way to get in the theater. I’m supposed to be in there right now. I was supposed to report for transport. So that’s what I’ll do. I’ll report for transport, and then once I’m inside, I’ll find the camera and I’ll destroy it.”

“And then you’ll be sent to a camp,” Ollie says quietly.

“And?”

“Mina—” Sanne begins.

“What?” she says fiercely, her voice breaking. “It’s my fault, no one else’s! Leo just said so. And you always talk about how the mission is more important than any one of us. So I’ll do it. I’ll turn myself in this afternoon.”

Sanne opens and closes her mouth again. Ollie buries his head in his hands, and Leo stares hard at the desk. Nobody says anything. Nobody has to. Mina’s offer is horrible, and it’s also the best option they have.

I clear my throat. “I can get one.”

It’s the first time I’ve spoken in this entire exchange. Everyone swivels toward me. There are so many things I have done wrong in this war. Starting with Bas, starting from the beginning. But all through it. The times I have known things were wrong and told myself the best thing to do was ignore it. “Mina doesn’t have to turn herself in. I can help you get the camera,” I continue. “But when I do, I want to also get Mirjam Roodveldt. I won’t ask any of you to help me with that part. I’ll take those risks myself; if I’m caught, I’ll say that I’m acting on my own.”

Nobody responds.

“You’re saying you need a uniform to get the camera,” I say finally. “I’m saying I know how to get a uniform.”

⋯⋯⋯

The second-to-last time I saw Elsbeth:

She was eighteen, I was seventeen, Bas was dead. She’d met her soldier by then. Her mother didn’t mind the relationship. Her parents supported the German occupation, though they weren’t obvious about it. It was a private, obsequious support.

It was six months after the invasion. My marks had plummeted, while the rest of the school tried to stagger on like everything was normal. Elsbeth was the only friend I still saw. She came over dutifully, every day, even while I stared at the wall and said nothing. She played with my hair, or told me the latest gossip, or brought random gifts that served no purpose other than to produce a shadow of a smile: A windup toy. A funny card. A lipstick in the ugliest shade of coral, which she smeared all over her mouth, puckering her lips and prancing around my room, telling me to kiss her.

One afternoon Elsbeth came over and sat on my floor, flipping through magazines she’d brought over, her latest effort to cheer me up. She was quieter than usual. I stared at my feet and Elsbeth smiled like a sphinx, like something had happened and she wanted me to guess what it was. Finally she couldn’t hold it in any longer. “Rolf loves me,” she said. “He told me yesterday, and I said it back.”

“No, you don’t,” I said automatically. “You don’t love him. You flirt with everyone.”

She pursed her lips, and I could tell she was gathering patience before responding. “I’ve flirted with enough boys to know the difference. I love Rolf. He wants to marry me. After the war, I’ll move back with him to Germany.”

“You can’t,” I told her, but even as I said it, I wasn’t sure what I was telling her she couldn’t do. Marry a German? Leave the country? Have somebody when I had nobody? Her words had bludgeoned me, bludgeoned even the parts of me I thought were already dead. How could she want to marry one of them? “You can’t, Elsbeth. You want me to be happy for you, but I can’t be. I can’t forgive you for loving the side that killed Bas.”

“Rolf didn’t kill Bas. Rolf doesn’t even want to be in this country. He wants the war to be over so he can go home,” she said. “He doesn’t agree with what Germany is doing—he was sent here. You’re just upset right now.”

“Of course I’m upset right now,” I exploded. “Can you even hear yourself? Are you listening to what you’re saying? You want to marry a Nazi, after what they did to Bas.”

“I’m sorry, Hanneke, that I can’t sit with you and be depressed forever,” she spat. “I’m sorry that my life is going to move on.”

“I’m sorry, too. I’m sorry because it should be your boyfriend who is dead, not mine. I hope he dies soon.”

She looked at me for almost a full minute before she spoke again. “Maybe I better go for now,” she said finally. “I’m supposed to meet Rolf anyway.”

“Go,” I said. “And don’t ever come back.”

TWENTY-TWO

———

The streets are still quiet when I leave Mrs. de Vries’s. A few schoolchildren, a few milkmen and street sweepers, but otherwise, our early-morning meeting is over before I would normally even leave for work. I’m somewhere between euphoric and half dead; floating spots drift in front of my eyes whenever I look too long at one thing.

Maybe my parents aren’t awake yet. Maybe they went to bed last night and left the door unlocked for me. They’ve done it before. Not often. But at least twice they’ve gone to bed early without making sure that I came in before curfew. I peel my shoes off on the stoop of my building, tiptoeing up the inside stairs.

Three steps from the door, it flies open.

“Where have you been?” My mother crushes me to her chest. “Where have you been?”

“I’m sorry,” I say automatically. “I’m sorry; I was with some people, and I didn’t realize how late it had gotten. When it was past curfew, I just had to stay.”

“Which people?” Behind my mother, in his chair, my father’s face is flat and icy. He almost never gets angry, but when he does, it’s so much more terrible than my mother. “Which friend would let you make your parents worry?”

“Someone from work,” I elaborate. “I was helping Mr. Kreuk. It was for a funeral. He needed me to go talk to the family. That’s why I ran out of here so quickly yesterday; I almost forgot. They were grieving, and I didn’t feel like I could leave, and then curfew passed and I was stuck.”

“Mr. Kreuk?” she says.

“He apologizes, too.”

“I’m going to see him right now. I’m going to see him right now and tell him—”

“Of course,” I interject. “Of course you should go visit Mr. Kreuk. I only hope he doesn’t feel he needs to hire another person, if he can’t count on me to work nights in cases of emergency.” I’m praying that she won’t go see Mr. Kreuk. She won’t want to do anything to jeopardize my job.

“Do you have any idea what you put us through?” my father asks. “Do you have any idea what last night was like for us?”

“I do. I can imagine. But I’m fine. I’m fine.”

Mama releases me from her hug, turning toward my father. Her hands dart in front of her face, swiping. Is she crying? When she turns back to face me, there are no tears, but her face is red and blotchy.

“I’m sorry,” I start to say again, but she silences me with a shake of her head.

“Go and change your clothes, then come back for breakfast.”

“Go and… what?”

“Your clothes. I’m going to cook breakfast. You are going to eat breakfast. You are never going to stay out all night without telling us, ever again. But right now, you are going to change your clothes and comb your hair, and we will not speak of this morning.”

I don’t know why she’s offering me this reprieve—maybe it’s just that she’s as exhausted as I am, maybe she doesn’t want to fight today—but I’ll take it.

In the bedroom, I drag a comb through my hair and pull on a plaid dress that Mama loves but I hate. It’s an olive branch gesture, and she’ll recognize it that way. My bed is still unmade from yesterday morning, and I desperately wish I could crawl into it. Instead, I splash cold water on my face in the bathroom and pinch life back into my cheeks. I want to see Ollie and the rest of the group, so we can keep making plans. But we’d been awake so long, we decided it was better to rest, change clothes, and freshen up. Ollie said he would find me later.

When I come out of my bedroom, Mama’s rushing around the kitchen, pulling food out of the cupboards, not just the porridge that we usually have for breakfast, but the rest of our eggs and a side of ham I didn’t even realize Mama was saving. Instead of the careful, responsible rationing she usually does, Mama is making breakfast like there is no war, like everything is normal.

“Bread?” she asks when she hears me come in, her upper body buried in the pantry. “If I sliced bread, would you eat it?”

I glance at Papa, trying to figure out how I’m supposed to respond, but he won’t meet my gaze. “If you want to, slice it. I’ll eat anything you make.”

We sit down at the table to more food than we normally have in a week. I can tell Papa doesn’t believe my lie. His eyes are on me with every bite I take, while I talk about any silly thing I can think of—the weather, the loose button on my skirt, the good price I saw on turnips—and secretly wonder how long I’ll have to wait for Ollie to arrive. Will he try to get in contact with Judith first, to see if she has any ideas? Did he even specifically say he would come to me, or was I supposed to find him? I’m so tired I’m not even thinking clearly. Should I go to Leo’s and wait?

It’s Sunday, not a day I normally work, so I don’t have any excuse to leave the house. Mama is watching me like a hawk anyway. Instead of escaping, I help with the chores that didn’t get finished yesterday. We wash the windows, sweep the floors, and finish polishing the silver. When we run out of polish, I hopefully suggest that I could go borrow some from a neighbor, but Mama triumphantly produces another jar. When I suggest that I could go buy a newspaper for us all to read, Papa is the one who stops me, saying he has an idea of something he’d much rather listen to than news stories.

“Why don’t you play something, Gerda,” my father encourages my mother.

“Oh, a neighbor could be napping, and I need to peel the beets for lunch,” she protests.

“No, play something, Mama. I’ll peel the beets.”

At first I suggest it because I think music will put her in a good mood. But when she sits down at the piano, I’m longing to hear her play, too, like she used to. Before the war, I’d be able to hear the music from halfway down the block, first a melody played by my mother and then a student’s plodding, clunky version a few seconds later.

She doesn’t play at once, just lets her hands rest on the keys. When she finally starts, it’s a beginner’s tune, one she even managed to teach me before admitting I had no musical skill. It’s basic and simple, not the kind of music you would play to show off. The paring knife hangs in my hand. This song reminds me of being young and carefree. She plays it again and again, each time adding a new variation that makes the tune more complex, until the original simple melody is barely audible beneath the trills and chords on top of it. It’s still there, though, when I listen closely.

After an hour, Mama is lost in the music and Papa dozes in his chair. I think my transgression is mostly forgiven. In another hour, I’ll try to leave. I’ll tell them I’ve made plans with Ollie. They like him. Just when I’ve settled on that plan, I hear a noise, under the sounds of Mama’s playing. Mama hears it, too, and stops, her fingers poised a few centimeters off the keys.

“Hanneke!” The call comes from downstairs, and since the voice is half whispering, it’s hard to make out who it belongs to.

I throw the window open with beet-stained fingers, leaning my chest out to see who’s standing on our stoop. “Ollie? Are you there?”

“No, it’s me.” A tall figure standing next to a bicycle steps back and removes his hat.

“Willem? What are you doing here?”

“I’m sorry,” he shout-whispers, trying not to disturb the neighbors. “Ollie gave me your address but not your apartment number. I didn’t know which buzzer to ring.”

“I’ll be right down.”

As soon as I close the window, Mama stands, the piano bench scraping across the floor. “Who is that?”

“A friend. He didn’t know our apartment number.” I start to pull on my coat. “I told him I’d be right down.”

“No, you won’t be right down. Not with a boy I’ve never met.”

“It’s Willem—he’s Ollie’s roommate.” The bowl of beets still sits on the floor where I finished peeling them. “Do you want me to put these on the stove?”

“No.” Mama slams the lid down on the piano, creating a sickening wooden crack. “I forbid it. You were out all last night.”

“I’m not going to be out all night this time,” I explain patiently. “I just want to go talk to Willem for a while.”

Her chin quivers and her eyes have a wild look to them. “I forbid you to leave this house again. You are still my child, Hannie.”

“Oh, Mama, I’m not your child.” It’s the sort of thing that I would usually scream in anger, only now when I say it, I just feel tired and sad. “I bring the money into the house. I buy the groceries, run all the errands. Mama, I’m the one who takes care of you.”

Mama’s face crumples, and all the goodwill we amassed during the breakfast and the piano playing disappears. “The daughter I know never would have spoken to me this way.”

It’s nothing she hasn’t said to me a dozen times, but this time it stings. I’m exhausted by these comparisons to the girl I was before the war. By replaying all the ways I was better and the things I will never get back.

“That daughter doesn’t exist anymore,” I say to Mama, and my voice is resigned. “She is gone, and she’s never coming back.”

TWENTY-THREE

———

Are you all right?”

Willem takes my arm as soon as I get outside. I wonder if he heard the fighting coming through the open window, or if he’s just reading my face.

“I’m fine.”

“This is how you look when you’re fine?” he asks lightly.

“No, this is how I look when I don’t want to talk about it.”

If I said that to Bas, he would have put his hands out in fake kitty claws, hissing and pretending to paw at the air until I laughed. If I said that to Ollie, he would say something equally sarcastic back to me, giving as good as he got. When I say it to Willem, he just nods, looking concerned.

“I’m sorry,” I say. I don’t want to think about the stricken look on Mama’s face when I walked out the door. “Did Ollie send you?”

Ollie was going to come and see me himself, Willem explains, but he asked Willem to let him sleep for twenty minutes first. “I’m letting him sleep for a few hours instead,” he says. “He’ll be furious when he wakes up, but he was barely coherent. If I’d let him ride to your house, we’d be fishing him out of a canal this afternoon. He works too much. So it’s just me, and with your help, you and me.”

“You and me for what?”

“Sanne and Leo are bringing food to some of the children in hiding. When Ollie wakes up, he’ll go to Judith’s spot and find out anything she might know about the soldiers who usually lead the transport. You volunteered to get the uniform. And I’m hoping you’ll help me do my job as well.”

“What’s your job?”

“My job is to figure out the escape route.”

I don’t know Willem nearly as well as Ollie, but he has a reassuring kindness that immediately feels familiar. While we walk through my neighborhood, he keeps his head bent toward mine as though we’re having an intimate conversation, but what he’s really doing is explaining the Schouwburg.

Some of it I already know. The theater is only a stopping place—Jews are brought there for a few days or weeks. After the theater, the next destination is a transit camp elsewhere in the Netherlands. Prisoners don’t stay at those for long, either, Willem explains. They’re just way stations before the prisoners are taken out of the country, to other camps with foreign-sounding names, to places where healthy young men may die of mysterious illnesses.

But before any of that happens, Jews are packed onto trains at a station on the outskirts of the city. And to get to the railway station, soldiers sometimes put the prisoners on trams or trucks. But often, they simply force the prisoners to walk.

It’s not far, about two kilometers. They don’t block off the streets or make any special preparations for the transport. Sometimes they do it at night, while the rest of the city pretends to sleep behind its blackout curtains. Sometimes they do it in broad daylight.

So that’s our chance. Sometime in the space between the Hollandsche Schouwburg and the train station, we need to get the camera from the carriage—which will presumably have a child in it. And I need to spot Mirjam, distract the guards, and run with her to safety without anyone noticing. That’s all.

“But the soldiers?”

“That’s Ollie and Judith,” Willem says. “That’s their job today. You and me—our job today is just geography. We can do this. Everything is going to be okay.”

I want to believe him. He sounds sure, and I cling to that certainty. Not because I think he’s right, but because it feels good to have someone tell me everything will be fine.

Beside me, Willem looks at his watch and starts walking faster. “We need to hurry.” He takes my hand to pull me along. “The deportations to Westerbork are usually in the order the people arrived in. The prisoners from the roundup with Mirjam and the carriage should be deported in a night transport tomorrow. I wish we could practice by watching another one happening in the evening, but there isn’t one—we’ll have to follow one this afternoon to figure out what route they take.”

“What if there aren’t any holes in the route?” I ask.

“There’s at least one.”

“Which is?”

“They probably don’t think anyone is stupid enough to impersonate Nazis and stop a transport. So they won’t be expecting it.”

We stop at the end of the Schouwburg’s block, close enough to see the theater’s entrance without looking like we’re actively watching. Willem leans over his bicycle; he’s disabled his chain and is now pretending to fix it, working it back over the sprocket. It gives us a reason to loiter in the area. While he pretends to work, I watch the theater’s heavy door.

It’s a little before four o’clock. Precisely on the hour, it opens. I nudge my foot against Willem’s, and he easily slips the chain back into place, sighing like he’s sorry his broken bicycle held us up for so long. The soldiers appear first, two of them, one younger and one who reminds me of my father’s older brother, the one who still lives in Belgium and used to send money on my birthday.

The prisoners follow, carrying suitcases, disheveled and tired like they haven’t slept in days. The crowd is big, maybe seventy people, and the soldiers march them down the middle of the street. It’s a lovely winter day in Amsterdam, and though there are other people on the street, couples like me and Willem, nobody acts like the forced parade of people is out of the ordinary. Our sense of ordinary has become horrifying.

There’s no Mirjam, but there are girls her age or younger, surrounded by young couples and middle-aged men. One walks past, wearing a green tweed coat and felt hat. He keeps his eyes straight forward, but something in them is familiar, something about them makes me think of chalk dust. It’s my third-grade teacher. The one who used to bring a box of hard candies on Wednesdays and pass them out to us, one by one, as we left. I can’t remember his name. I didn’t know he was Jewish.

The soldier who looks like my uncle yells something. It’s in fast German; I can’t understand the words, but I can understand the meaning as he gestures to the end of the block. In front of me, an older woman trips in the crowd. The man next to her—her husband, from the familiar, tender way he touches her—tries to help her up, and the soldier lifts his gun and gestures for the man to keep going. He moves again to help his wife; the soldier spins his gun around, using the butt of it to shove the man forward. He staggers onward, and now it’s his wife who helps him. I try not to look.

“I wish their route didn’t have so many open spaces,” Willem says, walking his bicycle at a slow pace. Still we’re pretending to have a casual conversation. Still, we’re pretending not to notice the violence around us. “It isn’t as good for us.”

No, this route is not good for us. It’s the shortest distance to the railway station, which makes sense. But it also means we’re taking wide streets through open spaces, and long blocks that are uninterrupted by alleyways. There aren’t many places along this route that would make for good cover, and we need good cover. A uniform will only get us partway.

“As we walk along, think about what you see.” Willem’s eyes dart furtively to the left and then the right, sweeping along the horizon. “What route would let you get away with the least chance of someone seeing you?”

“We’ll be passing the Oosterpark,” I suggest. It’s a big, manicured municipal park, and it would be easy for several people to disappear into the Oosterpark’s darkness.

Willem thinks. “But we don’t have any contacts near the park. No one in our group lives there. Once you got there, where would you go?” He’s right. Besides, the Oosterpark doesn’t come until after we will have crossed two canals. It’s not a good idea for an escape route to rely on bridges; they’re too easily closed or blocked.

“It needs to be before Plantage Muidergracht,” I think out loud. “Close enough to get back to Mrs. de Vries’s. We should try to get Mirjam and the carriage as soon as possible after they leave the Schouwburg.”

“I think you’re right. If we get as far as the bridge, we won’t have a chance.”

Focus on escape routes, I tell myself. Focus on how close you are to saving Mirjam. Focus on that one life. I have to focus on Mirjam because I don’t want to think about my third-grade teacher, who I won’t be saving, or Mr. Bierman, who I won’t be saving, or any of Mirjam’s classmates or the entire group of people walking so close to us right now. I won’t be helping any of these people.

“What about here?” Willem stops walking, pointing up to a building like he’s merely interested in showing off the architecture.

We’ve come to an intersection where three streets cross each other, veining off at odd angles so that the sightline cuts off after less than twentyfive meters. If Mirjam and I ran from here, we’d be out of sight in five seconds, and two soldiers—assuming there were only two soldiers, assuming a lot of things—wouldn’t have enough bodies to explore which direction we ran to.

Scanning the buildings lining the street, my eyes land on a butcher shop. A large awning hangs over the entrance, orange, the color of our exiled monarchy. Somehow this seems like a good omen.

“That butcher shop.” I nod toward it. “Under the awning.” The shop itself is tucked back farther from the street than the shops next to it, so it already has more natural cover. Under the awning is a large plaster cow, life-size, more than big enough for one or two people to hide behind.

Willem gives a loud sigh, squatting to the ground in mock annoyance with his bicycle chain, while really taking the time to observe the butcher shop. “Good,” he says. “Between the cow and the way the doorway is built, you would have to know someone was standing there to see them.”

Does he really think it’s good? Do I? Or do I just want it to work? I can’t tell. This intersection Willem and I have chosen—this overhanging awning and this plaster cow—it’s more than one kilometer from the Muiderpoort station. That seems like a long distance. Is it enough space to save one life?

The transport has moved ahead of us now. Solemn, silent rows of people being taken to God knows what, and we stare after them, helpless. Then it’s just me and Willem.

“Are you going to be okay?” he asks. “With your part? With the uniform?”

“I’ll be fine.”

“If you need me to try to put you in contact with anyone… I don’t know that I know any of the right people, but I could—”

“It’s all right, Willem.”

He nods and hesitates before speaking again. “Hanneke, I hope you don’t take this the wrong way,” he begins. “It’s just that getting a uniform is usually the kind of thing we would plan weeks for. I like you. I think you’re a strong person. But Ollie… he is my best friend, and I can’t let anything happen to him. To any of them. You weren’t that eager to help us. I want you to tell me it’s okay for us to put our trust in you.”

I’ve spent two years wanting nobody to trust me, wanting not to be depended on. But now I have seen a transport, and I have seen a deportation center, and I have seen the hopeful handwriting of a frightened girl, and I have seen brave people forced to hide, and mean people become secretly brave, so when I open my mouth, I say to Willem: “You can. I’ll do my best, Willem.”

My throat starts to swell, and I look away, and when I finally look back, Willem is still holding my eyes, appropriately polite and achingly concerned. “I hope everything is okay with you, Hanneke,” he says. “If there’s something you want to talk about, I don’t need to tell the others.”

I bite down hard on my cheek because Willem’s question is so genuine and because, after everything that’s happened in the past twenty-four hours, I already feel so raw.

“It’s nothing. I’m fine. I just—I don’t sleep well,” I say finally. “I don’t sleep well, and I don’t cry, since Bas died.”

A half explanation. Still more than I’ve said out loud to anyone.

Willem places his hand on my arm again. “This won’t bring Bas back, Hanneke. I know you know that already. But just in case your mind is trying to get you to believe otherwise. You could rescue Mirjam and still not be able to sleep at night.”

TWENTY-FOUR

———

The doorbell has changed. It used to be a grinding, buzzing noise, and now it’s a clear-toned bell. At first I think I must have misremembered it, but how could I misremember a sound I’d heard one hundred, two hundred, five hundred times in my life?

Elsbeth must have had a new one installed when her parents moved in with her grandmother, and she and Rolf took over her childhood home. It’s strange to think of her this way, as a wife making domestic decisions about the way her household is run. I wonder if she tore down the wallpaper in the sitting room, too. She’d probably have the money to do that, and she always thought it was ugly.

No one answers the door, so I ring the new bell again, pressing my face close to the glass. Same sitting room. Same wallpaper.

I knew it would make me nervous, to come here. I knew it would be uncomfortable. I didn’t anticipate the heaviness of the dread spreading through my stomach, though. I didn’t know I would have to root my feet in place so intentionally, just to make sure I didn’t run away.

Nothing—no noises from the inside, no flickers of light from a reading lamp. Nobody is home. It’s better this way, I tell myself. Safer. Easier. I’d planned for a million contingencies: Her at home, him at home, both of them at home, and this is the one I knew would be the best scenario for me. It’s why I came now, because Elsbeth’s family always had a big Sunday dinner at her grandmother’s house, and I bet this tradition has continued even through the war. So why does a part of me feel so disappointed to not see her face?

Another thing that hasn’t changed about this house: the spare key on top of the doorframe, slightly rusty, cold in my hand.

Everything smells the same: the whole house, like cloves and laundry powder, the way it always did, the odor particular to the Vos family, the one I know well enough to have it be comforting. But this time I’m not a guest, I remind myself. This time I’m working.

Before I can second-guess myself, I slip all the way inside. The master bedroom is upstairs, at the end of the hall. I almost never went inside it, though Elsbeth would occasionally sneak in and return with her mother’s rouge for us to practice applying. As soon as I step into it, I know it’s wrong, though. This room doesn’t feel occupied; the bed is piled with a half-finished sewing project.

My heart sinks. If Elsbeth and Rolf haven’t moved into the master bedroom, then that means I have to go into a room I was hoping to avoid. Back toward the stairwell. The first door on the right.

I open the door and am overrun by ghosts. Elsbeth’s bedroom is where I spent so many afternoons: practicing dances, pretending to do homework, ranking our favorite film stars. Talking about how we would grow up and have babies at the same time, and eventually become old women together, walking around the square and holding each other’s arms for support. Stop. Stop.

Her dressing gown hangs on the door. It still has a hole in the sleeve, from the time we smoked secret cigarettes on the balcony.

To steel myself against emotion, I’m clinging to the practicalities of breaking the law. Elsbeth used to share this room with her older sister. Nellie’s wardrobe was on the left and Elsbeth’s was on the right. When she installed her new husband in her childhood home, I bet she gave him Nellie’s old space to use for his clothing. That seems like something Elsbeth would do, telling him to shove things aside, make room for himself anywhere. He would discover one of Nellie’s forgotten brassieres, and Elsbeth would laugh at his embarrassment.

I slide open the left closet. I’m right. Inside, neatly pressed men’s clothes, slacks and shirts, hang in a row. These are the clothes that Elsbeth’s husband wears. Her husband. Rolf. For her new life, which I am not a part of.

No uniform, though. The uniform isn’t in here; I check twice. He must have at least two—one to wear and one to wash—but there’s nothing in here. Nothing draped over chairs, nothing lying across the quickly made bed. Where could it be?

Back in the hallway, I open the linen closet. Inside is a wicker basket, full of crumpled towels and bedsheets, waiting to be washed. I paw deeper, looking for flashes of gray and black, the color of death, the color of the Gestapo. Toward the bottom, I spot something dark-colored, so I pull it out.

How could I have forgotten? Elsbeth’s grandmother gave gifts in twos. The Tonsil didn’t fit, and Elsbeth gave it to me, giggling at my face when I opened the hideous dress. But Elsbeth had to keep its mate, another dress in dismal grayish purple.

It smells like her, like talcum powder and perfume, and I have a dozen memories of Elsbeth in this dress. Making faces when her mother suggested she wear it to a party. Wearing it anyway, but trying to “accidentally” spill punch on it. Gossiping at the party about what a good kisser Henk was, sagely telling me that a first kiss was never as good as a second one.

I kissed Ollie, I want to tell her. I kissed Ollie, and Bas is still dead, and how are you doing, and was it stupid for our friendship to end because you loved a boy, or is that just what happens?

I stuff the dress back into the laundry basket and grab at the black collar peeking out from the bottom. Rolf’s shirt. And just as I’m grabbing the matching pants below it, the front door opens.

Without even thinking, I dive fully into the linen closet, squeezing myself next to the laundry hamper, Rolf’s rumpled uniform clutched in my fists. I ease the squeaking closet door shut, all but a sliver—I’m too afraid of the clicking sound to close it all the way. My heart is pounding so loudly in my ears I’m sure anyone could hear it, and I tell it to slow down, but it won’t obey.

“I can’t believe you forgot the cake. Dinner is not worth having without cake.”

Yet another thing that hasn’t changed: Elsbeth’s voice, teasing and bouncy and hitting me like a punch in the gut. My mouth opens in a whimper. I stuff Rolf’s evil uniform against my lips.

“Apparently life is not worth living without cake, if you’re my wife,” he teases her.

“So I like the sweeter things in life.” She laughs.

“Is there anything else you need while we’re here?” Rolf asks.

“I might as well grab a sweater, since Granny’s house is an icebox.”

They’re so normal together. I wasn’t expecting that. They don’t sound like war. They sound like jokes and kisses, like the friends I should still have. I hear her footsteps on the stairs, the squeak on the fourth tread. Her bedroom is the door before the linen cupboard; she’ll have no reason to walk past. Next door, I hear her opening her wardrobe, riffling through hangers, humming something tuneless. Elsbeth never could sing.

“Have you seen my yellow sweater?” she calls downstairs to the kitchen.

“Didn’t you put it in the hamper?”

Saliva pools in my mouth. I see Elsbeth’s slim ankles approach, closer, and my nose is tickled by her talcum powder. She puts her hand on the knob. What will I do when she finds me? I run through the escape scenarios I do with every Nazi, except that in this case they’re insane. I could hit her. I could hug her. I could greet her like the past two years never happened. But they did happen, and now I don’t just hate and love and miss Elsbeth; I also have to fear her.

“Elsbeth, it’s in here,” Rolf calls. “Your sweater was on the chair.”

She moves away again, heels tripping on the floor. My heart pounds out of my chest, both nerves and anger and grief. And then she’s gone again, my old best friend.

———

When I get home that night, Mama and Papa are already in bed. It’s too early for them to be asleep, but they don’t bother to come out. For years I’ve begged them for this—to just go to bed without waiting up for me—but now I picture them in their nightclothes, listening to me hang my coat, and it makes me feel unsettled. Something shifted between us, after the last fight when I left with Willem. I’m still their daughter, but I’m no longer their child.

There’s a letter propped against a book on my bedside table. I don’t recognize the handwriting on the envelope, and when I open it, a small, star-shaped note falls out. Christoffel must have dropped it off while I was out, after his father returned from Den Haag. A response from Amalia. Just what I thought I wanted a couple of days ago, and now it doesn’t matter at all.

Dear Hanneke, I read as I unfold the crisp notebook paper. I don’t know where she is. I wish I did. I miss my friend, too.

I picture Mirjam joyfully reuniting with her friend, carrying a stack of magazines, carrying weeks’ worth of thoughts and feelings to share, having the reunion that Elsbeth and I will never get to have.

When I fall asleep I have an old nightmare again, the one I used to have all the time after Bas died. He comes to me in his uniform with the letter I’d torn up. In the dream, he’s pieced it back together and is angry that I never read it. “It means you’ve forgotten me,” he says. “It doesn’t,” I try to tell him. “It doesn’t mean that at all. I think of you every day.

“Look,” I say to him. “I’ll read it right now. I’ll read it this very minute if it’s important to you.” But for every word I try to read, Bas turns a little paler and a little more gray. By the time I’m halfway through, he’s a corpse standing in front of me, and I can’t finish the letter, because I’m crying. When I wake up my eyes are dry—my eyes are always dry—but my sheets are twisted around my body and drenched with sweat. The next night, just before curfew, Ollie knocks on my door. When my mother answers, he explains: His mother isn’t well. He and his father need to take her to the hospital. Pia is afraid to stay home alone; might I come and spend the night with her?

My mother doesn’t agree or disagree; she doesn’t even look at me. She turns her head and says, “Do what you want to, Hanneke.”

“I should go, then, for Ollie’s mother,” I say.

Except, of course, Ollie’s mother is fine and Pia is probably home right now obliviously doing her schoolwork. Mirjam’s transport is scheduled to begin in two hours.

TWENTY-FIVE

———

Monday

We have to stand very close and stay very quiet, underneath the awning of the butcher shop. It’s a good spot, though. The awning and the ridiculous cow cover us as much as I hoped they would: Two pairs of soldiers have walked past without noticing we’re there. I just hope the sky stays clear. If it starts to rain or snow, one of them might duck under for cover.

I can’t see Willem, but I know he’s not far away, a few blocks down, hiding with a change of clothes for Ollie.

Because Ollie, Olivier, Laurence Olivier, when Bas was feeling silly, is now wearing the gray Gestapo uniform of Elsbeth’s husband’s. It’s too big around the shoulders. If anyone looked too closely at Ollie, they would realize he was all wrong, and if anyone who knew Ollie walked past and questioned his uniform, that would be even worse.

So this is the plan: for Ollie and me to wait under the awning until the transport comes. For him to stop the soldier leading it, saying he has orders to search one baby carriage for contraband. He’ll get the camera. He’ll meet up with Willem to change out of the uniform so that suspicious neighbors don’t see him wearing it. Ollie must be nervous, but he doesn’t show it. He stares ahead, into the night, at the people who hurry past on their way home. We have time. Half an hour, at least—we’ve gotten into position just before curfew—and we’ve been killing time by barking reminders and observations to each other.

“You’ll only have a minute to get her,” Ollie says abruptly. “I’ll be querying them about the carriage, showing the false orders Willem created. I’ll draw it out as long as I can, but you’ll have barely any time, and they absolutely cannot see you.”

“I know, Ollie.”

“And then you’ll run to the street around the corner, where I’ll meet you and—”

“Ollie.”

We both fall silent again. I know everything he can warn me about because we’ve been through every variation of the plan that we can think of, and because I’ve already been warned, several times: If I can’t find Mirjam or get her to come with me in the period of time that it takes him to get the camera from the baby carriage, then she is not going to be rescued.

Then I will have failed her.

“What are you thinking about?” he asks me.

“Nothing,” I say. “What are you thinking about?”

He turns away slightly, and in the shadows of the night, it’s enough to mask his expression. “I’m thinking about Bas.”

“You are?”

“Aren’t you, too?”

I am, too. I am, always. Bas ice-skating with my mother. Bas bringing me cake. Bas driving me crazy. Bas alive. Bas dead.

“Tonight I’m thinking about…” He stops and swallows. “I’m thinking about, what was going through Bas’s mind in the invasion, when he realized he was probably going to die?”

“Was he just thinking about how scared he was?” I say, and it’s easy for me to finish Ollie’s thought because I’ve had it so many times myself. “How scared he was and how much he wished he could be at home?”

“Was he in pain?” Ollie asks.

“Angry?” I say.

“Or was he just alone?”

“It was my fault,” I whisper. The words fall, breaking in front of me for both of us to see. “It’s my fault that Bas is dead.”

His face in the shadows is impossible to read. “What did you say?” he asks.

“Bas. It’s my fault that Bas is dead.”

The most terrible thing, and now I’ve said it out loud, and the enormity of that makes me gasp. When you say a terrible thing, it should be like a weight lifted off your chest, but giving voice to this thought has only made the weight heavier.

“What are you talking about? What happened to Bas wasn’t your fault. You were miles away. You didn’t pull a trigger. You didn’t release a bomb.”

“I know I didn’t pull a trigger.” It’s the same thing my parents told me after he died. That I wasn’t there. That I didn’t shoot him, or bomb him, or drown him, or do whatever it was, precisely, that caused Bas to no longer exist. “But I sent him. I told him to join.”

“Hanneke, you knew Bas. You knew him as well as I did. Do you honestly think he didn’t want to go? Do you honestly think he would have enlisted if, deep down, he didn’t really want to?”

He’s trying to make me feel better, but I only feel worse. I’m about to tell Ollie the secret that I never wanted to tell.

“He told me he didn’t want to,” I say. “During his party. I left, and he chased after me, and he told me he didn’t want to go, and I said he had to. I said it was his duty to. And he gave me a letter to read in case he died, but I didn’t. I took it home and threw it away because I was so sure he would come back, and I was so wrong, because he didn’t come back. Do you understand, Ollie? I made him go.”

My throat is sore, like the words themselves caused physical pain coming out of my mouth. Now I’ve said it all. I can’t look at Ollie, because I’m so filled with shame. He’s standing very still, but I can hear him swallowing back lumps in his throat. When he speaks again, his voice is thick.

“My last conversation with Bas was after the party, too. It was late. Everyone had left. He came into my room, and I asked why he wasn’t in bed, since he had to get up so early for training.”

“You talked to him after I talked to him?” I don’t know why this never occurred to me. Obviously Bas’s family would have talked to him—he lived with them. In my mind, though, I was the last person. I talked to him and then he died. That’s what I picture, and what keeps me awake at nights.

“Several hours after. The sun was about to come up.”

I don’t dare breathe. “What did you talk about?”

“I asked him how he was feeling. I asked him if he was scared. I said I wouldn’t judge him if he was, that I would be, too, in his position. He admitted he was scared—but he said that if he weren’t, it wouldn’t truly count as bravery, would it? And he called me a delicate flower for not volunteering. And I asked what kind of flower. And he said definitely not a tulip, because no one with two lips was going to want to kiss such a wimp.”

And now Ollie is smiling, at this memory of bold, silly Bas, and, amazingly, I’m smiling, too, even as we’re both so sad.

“And he gave me a letter, also.”

I freeze. Ollie reaches into his trousers pocket. The letter he pulls out is on notebook paper, the kind schoolchildren use for grammar exercises, the kind that Elsbeth and I, and Amalia and Mirjam, and young people everywhere use to share secrets. He holds it out. “Go ahead.”

It’s been folded many times over, carried in so many pockets, that the creases are soft and tattered. In the dark I have to hold it centimeters from my nose, laboring over every letter.

Laurence,

I’m sorry for being such a twit. You were a good big brother. Tell Mama she got to keep the good son, even though she won’t believe it at first (who would blame her?). There’s a little bit of money under my mattress, and you can have it. But I told Pia the same thing, so you’ll have to see which one of you is quicker. Tell Hanneke I love her. And to move on. Not too fast. Maybe after two or three months.

—B.

Now I really am laughing, covering my mouth with my hand, because it’s such an unsatisfactory letter, which in turn makes it so much like Bas: solemn one minute and ridiculous the next. Self-deprecating and sweet. “Why didn’t you ever show me this before?”

“Because I assumed you had your own letter. And because you never came to visit, after the memorial. I thought you didn’t want anything to do with my family.”

“I thought you all hated me.”

“I didn’t.”

“Ollie,” I say. “Do you think he meant what he said to you, about how he was scared but glad he was going?”

“Do you think he meant what he said to you, about not wanting to go at all?”

I don’t know. For two and a half years, I thought I knew. “I’m not sure.”

“Maybe Bas wasn’t sure, either,” Ollie says. “Maybe he wanted to go one minute and wanted to stay another.”

Tell her to move on, Bas said. Another thing I haven’t been able to give him.

Ollie puts his arms around me. His cheek presses against my forehead. His breath is in my hair, and on my neck, and before I can really think about what I’m doing, I tilt my face up so that I’m looking directly into his eyes. He smiles at me, and I move my lips toward his. It’s not even that I want Ollie. It’s more that I finally feel, for the first time in more than two years, liberated from some of the guilt I’ve forced upon myself. My lips brush against his and—

“Hanneke, what are you doing?” Ollie lurches back, holding his palms up to stop me from coming closer.

My hand flies up to my mouth. “I’m sorry, Ollie. I—I misinterpreted the situation.”

He shakes his head quickly; I can almost see him blushing even in the dark. “It’s just, I don’t think of you like that, Hanneke.”

“No. Of course you don’t. You were just being nice. I’m your brother’s girlfriend.”

“It’s not that.” He looks pained. “I love someone else.”

I’m hideously ashamed. Ollie, who has been kind to me a dozen times in the past week—I just betrayed that kindness by trying to kiss him, and he’s in love with someone else. Why didn’t he tell me earlier? “Judith?” I guess. “You love Judith?”

“Judith? No.” Ollie shakes his head. “I don’t love Judith.”

“Then who?”

He sighs. “How can I explain? It’s like this: You helped the resistance because of one person, Hanneke. I joined because of one person, too.… Because Jews aren’t the only ones who suffer because of the Nazis. I don’t love Judith. I love Willem.”

“You love… Willem?” My brain trips over the concept. “You love Willem?”

“No one else knows.”

I try to gather my thoughts. I know the Nazis have rounded up homosexuals and political prisoners. But I’ve never known anyone who was that way. “Are you sure?” I blurt out. “You kissed me, just a few days ago, in front of the Green Police.”

“I did kiss you. And after I did it, you told me then that I was a good actor. I am. Better than you, probably. You pretend for the Germans, during the war. I pretend for everyone, every day. I haven’t told anyone else. I’m an onderduiker, too. The world is my underground.”

“But I don’t understand. How did you know? How did you know that you—with Willem?”

“How did you know you loved Bas?”

“Because I did,” I say.

“I know because I do. I’ve known for a long time.”

“Are you in danger?” I ask, because I’m too stunned to think of the other dozen questions I’m sure I have.

“Will you tell anyone else?”

“Of course not.”

“Then no. As long as nobody knows.” His body stiffens. “The transport. It’s here.”

TWENTY-SIX

———

The sound of rows and rows of footsteps. It’s loud, especially when you’re tying your life to it. The thought of Ollie here with me comforts and then frightens me. So many people are putting themselves at risk. Willem in the shadows. Mrs. de Vries with Mina, waiting to take in Mirjam until we can get her to Mrs. Janssen’s. Mrs. Janssen, praying back at her house.

“Blue coat,” I whisper, as if I need the reminder. “I need to look for the blue coat.”

What if she’s not wearing it? What if she thinks the night is too warm, or she gave it away, or someone stole it? And the carriage—what if the carriage isn’t even on this transport? What if it was left behind, in the theater? Ollie can’t wear a Gestapo uniform indefinitely, to stop every transport. All the contingencies we couldn’t anticipate are running through my head as I think of how slender the plan is that we’ve rested all our hopes on.

Two guards bookend the prisoners, the same as the transport yesterday: The older man with the craggy, deep-lined features who looks like my uncle is in front, and the young one follows the prisoners. Line after line of them. My heart sinks. I don’t see her; it’s hard to see anyone who isn’t in the column closest to me. Beyond that, everyone is packed together, and their faces are visible only by the light of the full moon.

But in one of the rear rows, big and obvious and making noises as it rolls over the cobblestones: a baby carriage. And in the row behind it, another one.

Two. Which one is Mina’s? I could tell if I were closer; I’ve seen it before. But Ollie never has. What will he do? Should I try to whisper a description to him? Before I can do that, he’s gone, the heels of his boots clicking sharply across stones.

“Wait,” he calls out in his perfect German accent. The young soldier hears him and looks around, confused, for the source of this disruption. “Wait,” Ollie says again, crisply waving the papers Willem organized with his fake order on it. “There is a problem with this transport.”

“Halt!” the older soldier calls out. His prisoners come to an uncertain stop in the middle of the street as the soldier sweeps a flashlight in Ollie’s direction. “We didn’t hear of a problem,” he calls to Ollie.

“I don’t think the Gestapo is in the business of telling theater guards about our intelligence operations,” he snaps. “This order comes straight from Schreieder.”

At the mention of the top Gestapo official, the soldiers exchange a quick look with each other and hurry toward Ollie. “Don’t touch them,” Ollie snaps as one reaches for his papers. “Do you think I want you smudging up my work orders?”

My eyes grasp at the prisoners corralled behind the soldiers, locking on each row, desperately scanning for sky-colored material. Now both soldiers are looking at Ollie’s fake work order. Neither of them are looking toward me. I run.

I run straight into the Nazi transport.

I squeeze into the back, next to a woman who flinches when I press against her shoulder. “Mirjam Roodveldt,” I mutter without moving my lips. “Blue coat?” She shakes her head as I push ahead to the next row. “Fifteen-year-old girl? Dark hair.”

I edge up to the next line, repeating the name again. Most people ignore me. “Mirjam Roodveldt?” A few people shake their heads stiffly, begging me with their eyes to stop drawing attention to their vicinity.

“Mama, does this mean we get to go home now?” a young boy a few people over calls out, tugging on his mother’s coat. “If that man said there’s a problem? Can we go?”

“Silence!” the older soldier calls, breaking his conversation with Ollie without looking up. “Quiet the child, or I’ll quiet him.”

He’s just joking, the terrified woman mouths to her son, even as she covers his mouth with her hand.

“Mirjam?” I whisper, moving to the next row. The mother looks at me now. Stop, she mouths.

Over by Ollie, the soldiers are having a disagreement. One of them wants to listen to Ollie; the other says they should go back to the theater and get confirmation. A flash of blue—brilliant cerulean blue. I see it and then immediately lose it again in the dark. It was after the woman with the rosecolored hat. It was before the family with the stoic father carrying the sleepy girl.

“Mirjam?” I whisper. “Mirjam!” a little more loudly.

“Please be quiet,” whispers the woman with the hat.

“You’ll get us all killed,” the man next to her begs, his voice trembling.

“Silence,” the older soldier calls again. “Kurt,” he instructs the younger soldier standing next to him. “Shoot the next one who you hear talking.”

All the prisoners freeze in place, their breath cold and white against the night.

But I saw something. A movement, the last time I called her name. A few rows ahead of me, a girl turned her head just a fraction of an inch. Even in the dark, her coat is the color of the sky. Blood rushes in my ears as I ease up another row. One more line, and now I’m right behind her. My heart is pounding so fast, and this time not only in fear but in exhilaration for what I’ve almost done. I’ve found her. She’s going to be safe.

To my left, another movement. The soldiers have settled their disagreement over Ollie’s papers, and now the three of them are walking purposefully toward the first woman with the carriage. They gesture for her to remove the child, do it quickly. While their flashlights are pointed at her, Ollie looks up, searches for me frantically in the crowd. Go, he mouths when he catches my eye. Hurry.

I touch the back of Mirjam’s coat, and she swivels to look at me.

“Mirjam.” I’m barely moving my lips. “Come with me.”

Mirjam recoils, shaking her head in fear. Meters away, Ollie tells the guards that this isn’t the right carriage; he needs to see the other one. I can hear his shoes clipping on the stones, and I can tell he’s trying to walk slowly enough to buy me a few extra seconds. Thank you, Ollie.

“Mirjam, it’s okay. I know who you are.”

No, she mouths.

Over by Ollie, the woman pushing the second carriage takes her baby out of it. The baby starts to cry, a thin, piercing wail, but the sound provides enough cover that I can mutter instructions to Mirjam.

“We have to run. Follow me. People are waiting.” I reach down and lace my fingers through Mirjam’s. Her hand feels small and bird-fragile in mine. She’s so young.

Ollie has the camera and the film, the camera that represents hundreds of lives. He’s walking it past us, and in the moonlight his face is filled with terror, begging me silently to run, run now, leave Mirjam behind if she won’t follow me. I can’t. I’ve come too far. I’m holding her hand.

“Now,” I hiss. I tug Mirjam’s hand, pulling her to the side. Mirjam resists. “Now,” I plead.

The soldiers take their places again. “Hurry,” one says. “Move.”

And now everyone is marching again, and I’m marching with them. What have I done? Why didn’t Mirjam listen to me? Ollie is receding, back farther in the shadows with the precious cargo he came for, and I’m getting closer to the bridge, with its wide-open, deadly spaces. If we get all the way to the train station, they might make me board. We have to try running.

Forty more steps until the bridge. Thirty-five. We’re coming upon the final alley, the last place we could run before the bridge. I start pulling Mirjam toward it. Why won’t Mirjam follow me? Something’s wrong. Her hand twists in mine, struggles, breaks away.

She’s running, but not in the direction I am. She’s running directly onto the open bridge. Oh God, oh God, what is she doing? It’s the worst direction she could have run in. Her blue coat flies behind her, flapping in the cold, running, running away from me.

“Stop!” I cry out at the same time a soldier yells, “Halt.”

“Halt,” he calls out again, his boots clattering against the cobblestones. What should I do? Try to distract them? Run after her? Tell everyone else in this transport to run, too?

“Stop,” I start to say again, halfway between the alley and the transport.

Suddenly, the wind is knocked out of me as a pair of strong arms wrap around my waist and drag me back toward the alley.

“Let me go!”

“Let you go?” Ollie growls in a loud, ferocious voice. “I don’t think so. I saw you try to escape.”

Mirjam is still running along the cobblestoned street, then onto the bridge with its thick iron rails. Her legs are spindly. Her shoes clatter against the wooden planks faintly, under the heavier sound of soldiers’ boots. I claw at Ollie’s hands around my waist, trying to pry them loose. The camera digs into my hip, and he holds me tighter.

“I am overruling these guards on this matter! You are obviously a part of this—of this conspiracy plot. I’m taking you in for questioning immediately!”

“Please,” I say, and I’ve never heard my voice sound so desperate.

“No,” he whispers, and this time it’s real Ollie, talking to me, and not the Ollie pretending to be a soldier. “You can’t.”

“Please,” I beg Ollie. “They’re going to—”

Bang.

And they do. They shoot her. In the middle of the bridge, in the back of the neck so that blood bursts from her throat, slick and shining in the moonlight.

“No,” I cry out, but my words are muffled by another gunshot.

Mirjam’s knees buckle under her as her hands fly up to her neck, but I know she’s dead even before she hits the ground. It’s the way she doesn’t bother to break her own fall, the way she crumples to the ground with her head and shoulders hitting the cobblestones.

The prisoners stare, gaping, at the body in the middle of the bridge, some of them letting out shocked screams, some of them clasping their hands in silent horror. The boy who called out to his mother earlier is crying, and she still has her hand over his mouth so the tears and the muffled sobs squeeze through her fingers.

The young guard, the one who shot her, comes back to his post. “A warning,” he calls. His voice wavers; he wasn’t expecting this to happen, and he doesn’t know what to do now.

“Let’s go,” he calls out. “Quickly.” He’s not even going to move her. He’s going to make the other prisoners walk right around her, leaving her in the middle of the bridge for the milkmen and street cleaners to find in the morning.

Ollie pulls me along, away from the bridge, one arm wrapped around my waist and the other holding the camera.

“Walk, Hanneke,” he instructs me. “You have to walk.”

I can’t see where he’s leading me, because I’m crying. Sobs wrack my body, the first tears I’ve cried since Bas died. They blind me and taste salty and unfamiliar on my lips.

I’m crying for Mirjam, the girl I was supposed to save but couldn’t, and didn’t even know. And for the mother who was shushing her son, and the man who begged me to stop talking. I’m crying for Mrs. Janssen, who has no one and who I told I would help and who trusted me and who I failed. I’m crying for Bas. I’m crying for Elsbeth and the German soldier she chose over her best friend, and for Ollie, who can’t be with Willem, and for all the people in my whole country who saw the tanks roll in at the start of the occupation and have yet to see them roll out again.

TWENTY-SEVEN

———

Ollie leads me down back alleys and dark streets. I can’t even tell if the path he’s choosing is safe, if we’re making our way toward Willem. I don’t know if anyone else knows what happened, or if everyone is still waiting for us to return, thinking the plan has worked as it should. My feet move mechanically beside his. Finally he leads me down a short flight of stairs, and I realize we’re in what must be his and Willem’s apartment.

“Tea?” he says shortly.

It’s the first phrase he’s spoken. His hands shake as he opens cupboard doors and bangs them shut, forgetting where he keeps the cups. He looks toward the door, again and again. Willem is out there. Willem and Mirjam.

“Willem is still—” I start to say.

“I know,” Ollie cuts me off, and from the way his eyes flash, I can tell he doesn’t want to talk about it. Finally, he stops going through the cupboards, leaning against the counter and gripping its edges so tightly his knuckles turn white. “You’re okay?” he asks, his back still to me.

I don’t answer. How am I supposed to answer? Ollie slams his hands against the counter; I jolt at the noise. “Dammit. Dammit.”

What are you doing?” I ask as he starts to head back to the door.

“I have to make sure Willem is okay.”

“Ollie, you don’t know where he is.”

He pulls on his coat, buttoning it up to cover the Gestapo uniform. “I’m not just going to stay here. I’m not going to leave him. I have to go find Willem.”

“I’ll come with you.” I stand clumsily. “I can’t leave Mirjam, either. I can’t leave her body.”

“No.” His hand is already on the doorknob. “You can’t go back. You were just spotted being escorted away by a member of the Gestapo.”

“But I promised I would find her. She’s out there all alone. I can bring her to Mr. Kreuk’s. I have a key. I’ll take her there.” My voice is loose and out of control and doesn’t even sound like me.

Ollie leans his forehead against the door, his back to me. His shoulders move up and down. “I’ll get her,” he says quietly. “Willem and I will.”

“But why would you do that?” My eyes again fill with tears. “I was reckless and selfish. Why would you ever do this for me?”

He puts his hand beside his head on the door. “Because when she fell on the bridge—we never got to see Bas after he died. We never got to see him at all.”

There is no possible way for me to respond to such kindness. “Be careful,” I say. “Be safe.”

“Give me your key,” he says, and then once he has it: “Wait here. Don’t leave.”

“I won’t,” I say.

I wait a long time.

———

Tuesday

I wake up, and I’m not on Ollie’s sofa, which is the last place I remember sitting. Instead, I’m in a bed, and sun is streaming in through the windows, and Ollie sits across the room in an armchair. I jolt upright. I don’t recall falling asleep, and I hate my body for letting it happen. I must have shut down, from worry, sadness, and exhaustion, while Ollie was stealing back into the night.

“Ollie,” I whisper. My throat burns from all the crying last night.

“Good morning.”

“What happened? Where’s Willem?”

My panic clears when Willem appears in the doorway.

“I’m here; I’m safe.”

Safe. No more deaths last night except for Mirjam. She’s not safe and never will be. “Did you get—” I don’t know how to finish that sentence. Did you manage to get Mirjam off the bridge?

“It’s done,” Ollie says. “It wasn’t easy. But it’s done.”

“She’s at Mr. Kreuk’s?”

“Yes. And Mrs. de Vries knows what happened. And all the Nazis know, we think, is that two girls tried to run, and they shot one and caught the other.”

I look around at the room I’m lying in, with two bureaus, one of which has a picture of Ollie’s parents. “You gave me your bed.”

“Willem carried you in,” Ollie says. “We slept on the floor.”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry that you had to get Mirjam. I’m sorry for not running when I should have. I’m—” There’s so much more I should apologize for: my thoughtlessness, the way I lost my mind and tried to drag everyone with me.

“We got the camera. At least,” Willem says, too kindly.

“What are you going to do with it? Give it back to Mina or destroy the film?”

They look at each other. “We haven’t decided,” Ollie says. He hands me a mug that had been sitting on his armrest. “Drink.” I lift the cup by rote, but when the liquid slides down my throat, it doesn’t even register to me what it is. In the past twelve hours, I’ve felt everything I could possibly feel. Now I’m numb.

“I should go.” I’m wearing my clothes from last night, though someone has removed my shoes. I’m wrinkled and soiled. There’s a run in my stockings, my last pair. When I try to stand, my head spins.

Willem looks worriedly at Ollie. “She should have some breakfast. Shouldn’t she, Ollie?”

“I have to go to Mrs. Janssen’s. I have to tell her what happened.”

Nothing in my body wants to make that visit, but prolonging it will only be worse. Sometimes hope can be poisonous. I need to put Mrs. Janssen out of her misery as soon as I can.

Willem brings me my shoes, telling me over and over again that I don’t need to leave yet. Eventually he realizes he won’t change my mind, and wraps some bread and an apple in a napkin for me to take along. I can’t imagine eating right now, but I don’t want to tell him that. I’ll put the food in my bag as soon as I leave the apartment.

My bicycle is—I don’t even know where my bicycle is. Still in the lobby of Mrs. de Vries’s apartment, I assume, where I left it before Ollie and I took our positions at the butcher’s. In a happier version of the story, I would have ridden it home this morning after leaving Mirjam there, safe and sound.

Without a bicycle, I have to walk to Mrs. Janssen’s, which takes nearly an hour. I have a few coins in my pocket and I could catch a tram, but I think I deserve the pain. I worry along the way about how I’ll tell her. Whether it’s better to just come out and say it—“She’s dead, Mrs. Janssen”—or whether I should start from the beginning, explaining what happened and where the plan failed.

It turns out that I don’t have to say anything. Mrs. Janssen can tell, from my slumping shoulders or my rumpled clothes, or maybe just from the way I’m walking. She was waiting by the front window of her home, and when she sees me walk up the street alone, she drops her head to her chest.

“How did it happen?” she asks when she opens the door. It feels wrong to deliver the news on the steps. But then, all of this feels wrong.

Each word hurts my throat as I force it out. “She ran. I tried to get her to follow me and she ran. They caught her. She’s dead.” I add the last sentence because caught could mean she was merely captured. I don’t want to have to explain twice that Mirjam is never coming back to this house.

Mrs. Janssen leans heavily on her cane, and I feel like I’m watching another piece of her break. Numbly, I take her elbow and help her back inside her own house. We both sit on the ugly sofa in her living room. “What happened?” she asks. “Why did she run from you?” Her grief is quiet and dignified, and somehow this makes it worse. I think it would be easier if she had come completely undone, the way I did last night, when Ollie had to drag me home because I couldn’t even think straight. But Mrs. Janssen is grieving in a practiced way, the way of someone who is used to losing things.

Why did Mirjam run from me? If she was willing to run to escape the Nazis, why wouldn’t she run with me, the person who had just told her I was there to help her?

“I don’t know,” I admit. “But I was a stranger approaching her in the middle of the night, grabbing her hand, and telling her to follow me. Maybe she just got scared. The night was so confusing. We were all scared.”

“Do you think she thought you were a plant, working for the soldiers? Or maybe that she wasn’t sure which direction you were telling her to run in?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know.”

“I should have come.” Her face is stricken. “She didn’t know you, but she knew me.”

“You couldn’t have helped,” I say firmly. “Neither of us could have done anything.” I don’t know if that’s true, though. Should I have mentioned Mrs. Janssen’s name to Mirjam? Would that have helped? Why didn’t she follow me? Finally I offer the only comforting thing I have, as small as it is.

“We have her body. My friends were able to rescue her body. It’s at Mr. Kreuk’s.”

“Who is with her?”

“Nobody, right now. Mr. Kreuk usually comes in at eight thirty. When he gets in, I’ll ask him to take care of her. I’ll ask him to find a burial plot.”

“I’ll pay,” she says immediately.

“I will pay,” I say. I’ll pay with the money Mrs. Janssen gave me to find her. It’s the only thing I can do. We should be able to afford a headstone with that money. A simple one, but nice.

“You should go to the funeral home,” Mrs. Janssen says.

“I can stay. I can keep you company.”

“You should go, Hanneke,” she says. “I don’t want her to be alone.”

———

I go to Mrs. de Vries’s first, though. They already know what happened last night.

“Hanneke, I’m so sorry,” Mrs. de Vries says when she opens the door, sounding as sympathetic as I imagine she can. She must have seen me come in the building from outside, because none of the onderduikers are hiding. The Cohens sit on the sofa, holding hands. Mina runs from behind Mrs. de Vries and throws her arms around me.

“We saw the transport leave the Schouwburg last night.” Her face is buried in my neck. “Then we didn’t see anything. We kept waiting and waiting for you to get here, but we only knew for sure something was wrong hours later, when Willem came to us, looking for you.”

The children are awake, still in their pajamas, standing dumbfounded behind their mother, watching Mina and me and obviously trying to figure out what’s happening. Mrs. de Vries notices them and shoos them back toward their playroom, and the Cohens move to help her.

Mina and I stand, hugging each other in the entryway for a long time. In the back of the apartment, the twins laugh. I close my eyes and try to drown out the sound, which seems so inappropriate now. I want to crawl into bed for days. I want to give up.

Even Mina is crying. Brave, optimistic Mina who wanted to resist, even while she had to hide. And what good did it do? What good can any of us do against the monstrous machine that shoots young girls in the back as they run in fear?

I feel a soft tap on my shoulder. It’s Mrs. Cohen holding what looks like a folded white tablecloth. She apologizes for disturbing me, and holds out the material for me to take. “For your friend,” she explains. “I didn’t know if you knew—people of our faith are often buried in traditional burial clothes. This is only a tablecloth; in these times we cannot keep all our traditions. But I thought that perhaps you would like something to wrap your friend in before she is buried. Only if you want it. I don’t mean to presume.”

I dumbly take the tablecloth from her, the soft linen rippling through my fingers.

“We would also have a watcher stand with the body, so the deceased would not have to be alone. We can’t be there for the burial, of course,” Mrs. Cohen says. “But if you tell us what time it is scheduled for, my husband will make sure to begin the prayer of mourning at that moment.”

“Thank you.” I almost start crying again at this gesture. I barely know the Cohens; I’m not even sure how much they were told about what I’ve been doing or why. “Thank you,” I repeat, because I don’t know what else to say.

TWENTY-EIGHT

———

Mr. Kreuk doesn’t ask me any questions, about who Mirjam was or why I want to take care of her body, and for this I’m grateful. It’s a repayment, I think, for all the questions I haven’t asked him in the time we’ve known each other. At the office, he just pats me on the shoulder, and then neatly folds up his shirtsleeves the way he always does before getting to work. A few hours later, he tells me that the body has been dressed, except for socks and shoes.

After leaving Mrs. de Vries’s house, I’d gone home and sorted through my clothes to find something for Mirjam. Mama and Papa were gone at Papa’s regular doctor’s appointment. I chose a dress that they’d given me for my birthday a few years ago. It still fits—one of the rare nice things I own that does—but I folded it up anyway, and put my favorite patent leather shoes in a bag.

“Can I?” I whisper to Mr. Kreuk. “Can I be the one to do that?”

He looks startled. This is the first time I’ve ever asked to be in the same room with a body. Normally they’re brought in through the back entrance, cleaned, dressed, and then placed in their caskets. I don’t even go into that room.

“Are you sure?”

I nod. “It’s important to me.” Because I failed her. Because I found her too late. Because her blue coat is ruined, covered in blood.

He takes me into the small white room. I carry the shoes and socks and the linen tablecloth Mrs. Cohen gave me. I should have asked her to explain what I was supposed to do with it. Is it meant to be wrapped around Mirjam, or just placed over her? Was I even supposed to bring the other clothes, or is she supposed to wear only burial shrouds? Or does it even matter? Mrs. Janssen said the Roodveldts weren’t observant.

Mr. Kreuk stands a few feet behind me as I look at the body that used to be Mirjam, lying on the cold table. I’ve been with a dead person only twice before, at my grandparents’ funerals when I was eleven and twelve, and then there was dim lighting and music. Now there is just stillness, and Mirjam. She’s so small.

Here she is, in person, the first real time I’ve seen her. Her face is heartshaped, with her dark hair forming a widow’s peak at her forehead, and her chin comes to a little point, with a small birthmark to the left of center. Her eyelashes are thick and long. Nobody told me that, when they described her, how velvety her eyelashes are. Her nose is blunted at the end, a bit too short for her face. Nobody told me that, either. Just below the collar of the satin dress, the edge of a white bandage covers up the exit wound of the bullet that killed her. I adjust the collar, cover it up.

“You’ve done—you’ve done a beautiful job. Thank you. She looks almost—” I’m supposed to say that she looks almost as she did in life, which is what people say to Mr. Kreuk when they want to thank him with the highest compliment. I can’t say that, though, since I really have no idea what she looked like in life. “She looks peaceful.”

“Is there anything else I can do for you? Or your friend?”

“I don’t think so.”

“The burial arrangements. Will you be needing a traditional plot or… or a special one?”

This might be his way of asking me if Mirjam needs to be buried in a Jewish cemetery. I know how difficult finding such a place would be for him.

“Just somewhere pretty. There won’t be a funeral. Just a burial.”

He hesitates, as if trying to decide whether to speak, and finally leaves without saying anything

I can’t bring myself to touch her yet. Instead I turn to where her blue coat sits folded neatly on a table. The collar and top buttons are drenched in dried blood, which spatters down the rest of the coat, rusty and brown. Mr. Kreuk has already checked the pockets and laid her personal effects on top of the coat. Her identification papers, shot through and now also rustcolored, and a letter, which must have been in her side pocket because the paper is clean and white.

If I could go back and never meet T to begin with, I would do that, right now. It was such a stupid thing to come between us. I’m going to make it up to you when I see you again.

Love, Margaret

Mirjam’s last schoolgirl note about her last drama. Why did she write it? Was Amalia upset that Mirjam was spending too much time with Tobias? Had Amalia met Tobias and she disapproved of him? It’s amazing how little any of that matters now.

As Mr. Kreuk promised, Mirjam is dressed except for her feet and lower legs, which lie bare below the calf-length dress. I pick up one white sock and begin to ease it over her toes and heel. Her feet are so cold. Her feet are so cold, and just hours ago they were running over the stoned streets, and suddenly there are tears falling down my face. All the games I used to play, to try to convince myself that Bas didn’t die alone. But when it comes down to it, we all die alone.

The shoes I brought for her are my nicest ones. My party shoes for the parties I don’t go to anymore, with satin bows at the toe. My feet are a little bigger than hers, so the shoes don’t fit exactly, but she’ll never know the difference. When I’m finished with the dressing, I pick up one of Mirjam’s hands and fold it over the top of the other, smooth a few stray hairs away from her face, and adjust the hem of her dress, which rose high on her legs as I struggled with a sock. My tears start to flow at the oddest of things. The way her lips are chapped, like all our lips get chapped in the winter. Or her knees. Her perfect white knees, exposed and vulnerable until I brushed the dress back over them.

I tell Mr. Kreuk I’m sick and I need to go home. He knows I’m lying but doesn’t say anything other than that he hopes I feel better soon, and that it would be helpful to know how many people will attend Mirjam’s burial.

“Just me,” I say. “As soon as possible.”

He says he has a cemetery plot already and should be able to arrange for a grave to be dug by tomorrow morning. He gives me a time to come to the cemetery. I don’t know how he’s found a plot so quickly, unless it belonged to someone else, and that someone else no longer has a place to be buried.

Before I leave the office, Mr. Kreuk takes my hand and presses something into it. I look down. A large bar of Belgian chocolate, a name brand, better than any I’ve seen since the war started. He could sell it for twenty times its value on the black market, and that’s how I know he cares. Giving away black market goods is any smuggler’s greatest sacrifice.

 I start for home. I should have thought to pick up my bicycle from Mrs. de Vries’s when I was there, but I didn’t. I’ve walked to every location I’ve been to this morning, miles and miles, and somehow barely noticed it. The cold seeping through my coat, and the brick punishing my feet: These feel like welcome pains, much easier to deal with than the empty ache in my heart. When I finally do get home, after forty minutes of trudging, my bicycle is waiting for me outside my building, and so is Ollie. His tired voice makes strained and banal conversation with my parents.

“I was just going to drop your bicycle off,” he explains. “But your mother happened to see me out the window. I was just telling her how you let me borrow it to go to the hospital with my mother and father. Pia is so grateful you were able to come and stay with her.”

“It was nice to see her again. And I’m glad your mother’s illness was a false alarm.”

It seems strange to me that I will get through all this and Mama and Papa will never know what happened. These lies I told them, about where I was and who was sick and which hospital Ollie’s mother was at—they all feel foolish now. I sit down next to Ollie while my mother brings lunch. His hand finds mine under the table. It’s warm and comforting, and when I squeeze it, he squeezes back.

“Mr. Kreuk has arranged everything for the burial,” I whisper to Ollie when Mama is busy in the kitchen and Papa reads in the front room. “Thank you for picking up my bicycle.”

“When is the burial? I’ll come.”

I tell him he doesn’t need to, that he never knew Mirjam. It’s a silly thing to say, when I didn’t know her, either, though I felt like I did in ways that aren’t worth explaining now. Ollie insists on coming and says he’ll meet me at the cemetery tomorrow morning.

In the end, Ollie and Willem both come, and so does Mrs. Janssen. It’s the first time I’ve seen her out of her house. She’s walking heavily on her cane, and Christoffel has come with her in a taxi, helping her, offering his arm as she picks her way slowly over the bumpy grass and rocks.

Mr. Kreuk found a plain pine casket for Mirjam and brought it here in the hearse. It’s the most basic option we sell, but still worth a week of my wages.

We stand around the empty grave while the casket is lowered into the ground. We don’t have a minister or a rabbi. It’s just the six of us and two gravediggers, who stand a few meters away under a cluster of trees, their hands resting on their shovels.

Mrs. Janssen mouths a prayer to herself, and I think Willem’s lips move as well. Ollie and I don’t say anything. We just stand while the casket is lowered into the ground, and after ten minutes of respectful silence, the gravediggers move up from behind us to begin filling the open hole with dirt.

TWENTY-NINE

———

Wednesday

When the burial is over, Mr. Kreuk pulls away in the hearse after telling me to take a few days off, to come back to work when I feel better. Mrs. Janssen leaves next, leaning on Christoffel for support as she folds herself back into the taxi. She asks me to come and visit her soon, and I promise I will, though right now doing so is difficult to imagine.

Ollie and Willem are both looking at me as we stand together in front of the cemetery’s gates. “Should we ride you home?” Willem suggests. “Neither of us has class this afternoon.”

“I don’t really want to go home at all.” My parents don’t know today is anything other than a regular day. The idea of making up an excuse for why I’m home early and sitting with them in hidden mourning is unbearable. I should go back to work, but I don’t want to do that, either. I’ve had enough death for today. “Could we do something else?”

“What did you have in mind?” Ollie asks.

“Anything. Anything besides go home or stay here. Something normal.”

He looks blankly at Willem. None of us knows what a normal afternoon even looks like anymore, one in which we’re not ferrying children from the Hollandsche Schouwburg, or trying to find places for onderduikers, or trading on the black market. If there were no war, and if we were normal young adults, what would we be doing today?

“How about…” Willem bites his lip. “How about we go for a bicycle ride?”

“A bicycle ride?” Ollie’s mouth twitches. It’s one of the coldest days of winter. We all ride our bicycles all the time anyway, just to get around, but it’s hardly the weather for a pleasure ride. “I’m sorry,” he apologizes to me. “I didn’t mean to laugh.”

The suggestion appeals to me, though, for the same reason that walking in the cold appealed earlier. There’s a level of drudgery and unpleasantness involved. It won’t be a purely joyful ride. It will be numbing, which seems pleasing.

“Yes.” Willem is gathering steam now. “We’ll go to Ransdorp. We’ll ride through the countryside. We’ll have a picnic.”

Now he’s deliberately being silly. Ransdorp is a village on the other side of the river, with farmhouses and a few little shops lining wide gravel streets. The idea of going to a quaint tourist destination now is especially absurd.

But we do it anyway, taking the ferry across the river, to the same point where I met Christoffel a few days ago and asked him to deliver a letter. We stop and find bread on the way, Willem and Ollie sticking loaves into their deep coat pockets while I tuck the bottom of my dress up enough that it won’t get caught in my bicycle spokes.

It’s cold, as cold as I expected it to be, but the sun makes it bearable, and when we get off the ferry, the pedaling keeps us warm. We must look strange: Ollie and Willem in dark suits and me in the only black dress that I own, cycling in a single line along the road next to a creek. I get a stitch in my side from the exertion. It feels good, so I pedal faster until I overtake the boys, first by a little and then by a lot.

“What are you pedaling away from?” Willem calls after me. His tone is light, but it doesn’t feel like a joking question. I’m pedaling away from these past few days. From the sight of Mirjam on the bridge, and the sound of a gunshot in the still night, and the look on Mrs. Janssen’s face, brittle and resigned, in her doorway. Gravel sprays off the back of my tires.

“Slow down!” Ollie calls behind me. He says something else I can’t hear.

“What?”

“Slow down, there’s—”

My bicycle slides over a patch of black ice, the wheels spinning out of control. I try the brakes, but there’s no traction. I can’t stop myself, and the bicycle goes careening into the ditch as I fly toward the frozen ground. My hands scrape along the dirt when I put them down to break my fall. They hurt, but my left knee is worse—I feel it crash against the handlebars when I fly over them, and then land on something sharp and painful.

“Hanneke!” Ollie calls.

The wind has been knocked out of me; I retch on the ground, trying to suck in enough air to answer. “I’m fine. I’m fine,” I manage, holding up a dirty palm to let him know I can take care of myself. Slowly I ease myself onto all fours, but standing seems like too much, and finally I let Ollie help me sit back down on a patch of frozen grass. Tentatively, I pull up my skirt. My left knee is a bloody mess: one large rock jutting out of the center, with small gravel particles surrounding it.

Willem crouches to look at the wound. “We need to clean that out,” he says. “I can’t tell how bad it is.” He runs to the creek, soaking his handkerchief and squeezing it out on top of my knee, rinsing away rivulets of dirt. The three of us examine the damage. The big rock isn’t in as deeply as I feared, but when Willem pulls it out, a fresh stream of blood rolls down my shin.

“Did that hurt?” he asks.

“Yes,” I say, and then, inappropriately, I giggle, because it seems so pedestrian after everything that’s happened to have a scraped knee from a bicycle accident, and to have that be what hurts.

He gives me a funny look. “Are you all right?”

“Yes,” I say, stifling another laugh.

“Well, press this down,” he instructs me, handing me the handkerchief. “It doesn’t look too deep. Except for that rock, the rest is just scratches. You’ll probably have a little scar. If we tie up your leg with the handkerchief, do you think you’ll still be able to pedal home?”

Once I’m bandaged up, I accept Willem’s and Ollie’s outstretched hands, rising to my feet, and watch as Ollie drags my bicycle back up to the road. He hops onto it himself, riding in a few circles to make sure everything functions like it’s supposed to. I look down at my now-expertly bandaged knee. Bending it sends shots of pain down to my ankle, but it’s manageable pain.

“You’re sure everything’s okay?”

“Yes.” But as I climb back on the bicycle, I realize I’m not sure. And it’s not the pain. It’s that something is bothering me, and I can’t put my finger on it.

“We don’t have to go fast,” Ollie says. “If you want, one of us could ride ahead and try to find someone with a car to take you.”

What is it that’s bothering me? I pedal slowly, a rotating dull pain and sharp pain depending on which of my knees is bent. What’s bothering me? It’s right on the tip of my brain.

“Or you could ride on the back of one of ours, and we could come back later for your bicycle,” Willem offers.

“I can ride.”

My knee. My newly scraped, soon-to-be-scarred knee.

Mirjam’s knees. The bare white legs I saw while putting on her shoes and socks.

“Hanneke?” Willem asks. “I asked if you wanted to go first or last? Hanneke?”

Judith remembered when Mirjam got her beautiful blue coat. It wasn’t just a present, but a present she received because she’d torn her other coat beyond repair, mangling her knee, leaving a permanent scar.

Those knees in Mr. Kreuk’s basement room had no scars; they were smooth and white and knobby.

Ollie cycles in front of me, weaving side to side and looking back to make sure I haven’t fallen again. “Ollie,” I ask. “Were you going to check in on Judith today?”

He slows to a stop. “Why?”

“If you do, could you ask her to tell you about the birthmark on Mirjam’s chin? Ask her… No, that’s all. Just ask her to tell you about it.”

Now he and Willem are looking at each other. “Hanneke, maybe you should wait here with Willem while I ride ahead and find a doctor,” Ollie suggests.

I shake my head. Something is wrong, but it’s not what Ollie thinks it is.

“I need to get back, right now. If you talk to her, come and find me. I’ll be—” I think, trying to plot out where I’ll be, and where it will be safe for him to find me. “Call me at Mrs. de Vries’s; she still has a phone.”

“What are you talking about? Hanneke, stop.”

My legs burn, but I force them to pedal, harder, until I pass Ollie and head back down the gravel road toward the ferry. Ollie and Willem stand astride their bicycles, trying to decide whether to follow me. I can’t waste the time to explain any more.

I know what I saw. I know everything I saw, when I dressed Mirjam on the table yesterday. I know her knees were smooth.

It’s getting hard to breathe, but I don’t think that it has anything to do with how hard I’m pedaling, or with the cold air, or with my fall.

The ferry is in sight now. Passengers are trickling off. My knee stings, but I can’t focus on the pain at all. Right now, in this world crumbling before my eyes, there’s only one thing I can really focus on: the body I dressed yesterday. The body I cried over. I can only think of it like that now: the body. Because whomever I dressed—whoever that person was, it wasn’t Mirjam Roodveldt.

THIRTY

———

How could the girl on the table not be Mirjam Roodveldt?

Was there a different girl in a sky-blue coat leaving the Schouwburg, one I just didn’t see? Was I trying to help the wrong girl escape?

By the time I get to Mrs. de Vries’s, I’ve run out of new questions to ask, and the same old ones keep cycling through my brain. Mrs. de Vries doesn’t answer, but I know Mina must be here. After three knocks, I finally call through the door softly that it’s me and I’m alone.

“What’s wrong?” Mina asks from behind the door as she opens it just wide enough for me to get through. “You know I shouldn’t be answering the door—a neighbor could see me.”

“Where’s Mrs. de Vries?”

“At her mother’s with the boys.”

“And the Cohens?”

“Taking a nap, in the guest room. What’s wrong?”

I keep my voice low, taking Mina’s arm and guiding her back toward Mr. de Vries’s study, where we sat together just a few nights ago. “I need to see your slides. The ones from last week. Please don’t ask me what’s wrong again,” I beg, anticipating what she’s going to say by the round, puckered O of her mouth.

“You… what?”

“From the Hollandsche Schouwburg. Did Mrs. de Vries’s friend ever bring his projector?”

“He did,” she says uncertainly. “Just yesterday. We haven’t set it up yet.”

“Let’s do that now.”

The projector is in its traveling case by Mr. de Vries’s desk. While I turn off the light and close the door, Mina unloads it, black and heavy-looking, setting it on the desk so the lens faces an empty wall. When she plugs it in and presses a red switch, a white square of light appears.

You want to see the one with Mirjam in it?” she asks. I nod, and she sorts through the slides to find the right image and position it in the slide holder. The white square of light disappears.

In the small slide, even with the magnifying glass, Mirjam was barely more than a smudge of sky blue toward the bottom of the frame. Now, on Mrs. de Vries’s wall, she’s several inches tall. I can see her more clearly, but it’s still hard to make out details. She’s still a blue coat, in profile, disappearing off the corner of the frame.

“Mina.” I point to the girl in the corner of the frame. “Is this Mirjam?” I am controlled, almost emotionless. I don’t want to influence her answer with my tone.

Mina barely looks at it before turning back to me. “What are you talking about? Of course it’s Mirjam. You said—”

“Forget everything I said. I want you to look at this picture and tell me if it’s the girl you went to school with. Look closely.”

Finally, Mina looks again, leaning on her elbows, studying the frame. The projector emits a low, warm hum. I stay where I am, trying to remain as still as possible. “Well?” I ask when I don’t feel like I can wait any longer.

“Honestly, I’m not sure. That’s her coat. At least, that’s a coat exactly like the one Mirjam wore to school. But it’s from far away, and her head is in the middle of turning. It’s too blurry to tell. Why are you asking me this now?”

“Mina, look more closely. Is that girl Mirjam, or isn’t it?”

“I can’t tell, Hanneke.” She’s beginning to sound frustrated. “If someone showed me this picture and said, ‘Are any of your former classmates in this picture?’ I don’t know whether I would point to any of them. But if someone said, ‘Point to Mirjam Roodveldt in this picture,’ then the girl in the blue coat is who I would point to. Now can you tell me what this is about?”

“I don’t know. Something’s not right, but I haven’t figured it out yet. Can you make it any less blurry? By moving the projector closer to the wall or something?”

I examine the image from left to right like I am reading a book. There are the soldiers. There are the frightened people. There, a blur in the left, is a crèche worker. There, in the bottom right corner, is the girl who looks like Mirjam.

The ring of the telephone pierces the air, making me jump. It could be Ollie. I told him to contact me here. “Are you going to answer the telephone?” I ask Mina.

“I can’t answer it. I’m not supposed to exist here, remember?”

I dash out of the room, toward the telephone extension near the front entrance, and manage to pick it up on the fourth ring. It is Ollie, calling from someplace with noise in the background.

“Hanneke, I’ve just talked to our friend in the country.” He sounds formal and strangely controlled. “The mutual acquaintance from school that you were trying to remember? She didn’t have a birthmark on her chin.”

I keep my own voice as steady as his. “Interesting,” I say. “Perhaps we’re not thinking of the same person. Is she sure?”

“She’s absolutely sure. The girl apparently had a small mole on her neck, and she had the scars on her knee, but she didn’t have a birthmark.” There’s a long pause. “Would you like me to come over for dinner tonight?” he asks, which is really his way of asking What’s going on?

“Thank you for the offer.” I struggle for the same control he’s maintaining. “But no. I’ll be in contact soon.”

I hang up the phone by depressing the button on the base, and immediately dial Mrs. Janssen’s house, my finger shaking as I rotate the numbers on the dial, silently hoping that she still has a phone line. It rings.

What am I doing? A girl is dead. We buried her this morning. No matter who she was, it was sad and horrible and final. Maybe I should let it remain final. Maybe Mrs. Janssen has been through enough.

She answers on the fourth ring, groggy like I’ve woken her; I tell her how sorry I am to have called her and that I have a question I know will sound odd.

“Hanneke? Is that you?”

“Some friends and I have a bet about our acquaintance, Miss R,” I say, waiting a beat to make sure she’s following. “The bet was over whether she had a birthmark on her chin. Do you remember it?”

“Why are you asking me this?”

I close my eyes. “Please. Just answer. Did she have one?”

“I don’t remember. No? I’m not sure. Yes? Can’t you tell me what’s happening?”

“I’m going to come over later,” I tell her before hanging up. “I don’t know when, but I will.”

Mirjam Roodveldt didn’t have a birthmark but did have scars on her knee. The girl on Mr. Kreuk’s table had a birthmark, definitely, but no scars. The girl in Mrs. Janssen’s pantry may or may not have had a birthmark; Mrs. Janssen doesn’t remember seeing one, but admits she could have been wrong. Now the girl is in the ground and it’s too late for me to get confirmation from any of the people who could identify her.

Was I right all along, that day I told Ollie that it might not be Mirjam at the theater? Do I still have a chance to save the real girl?

Back in the office, Mina sits where I left her. She doesn’t ask me who was on the phone. She’s obviously beyond the point of expecting answers. The slide is still projected on the wall. Everything looks the same as it did five minutes ago. Nothing makes any sense. There are the soldiers. There are the frightened people. The brown coats. The lavender hats.

On my third pass, I see it. Something that all at once seems so obvious I can’t believe I didn’t see it before. “Something is off with this picture,” I whisper.

“What do you mean? The color might be off; the film was developed in a hurry.”

“Not that.” I move out of the way so Mina can see what I’m talking about. “Look at this closely. Really closely. Tell me if you notice anything about this girl’s face.”

Mina wrinkles her forehead. “I already told you; it’s blurry, and it’s hard to see her face. But I think she looks scared. As I would expect.”

“Not the expression. The direction.” I use the tip of my finger to draw explanatory lines in the air. “Here’s the soldier, to the left. Do you see? Giving instructions to the prisoners. And just in front of him is his partner.”

“And?”

“And every other person in the picture looks afraid of the soldiers. See the way this soldier is pointing? And how everyone else is looking in the direction he’s pointing? It looks like he’s telling everyone which way to go in the theater.”

Realization begins to dawn on Mina’s face. “What is Mirjam looking at?”

Mirjam’s face is pointed in another direction. She’s not paying attention to the soldiers at all. Whatever she’s looking at is far in the distance, out of the frame of the shot. It’s possible that it’s just a fluke, that she’d been looking at the soldiers, and a noise or a movement distracted her. That’s the most logical possibility and I know it. But I can’t get rid of another feeling.

Mirjam doppelgänger, whoever you are. Is it possible that Nazis weren’t the only thing you were afraid of?

THIRTY-ONE

———

Mrs. Janssen doesn’t answer the door when I knock. I try again, as loud as I dare without drawing too much attention to myself. “Hello? Mrs. Janssen, it’s me, Hanneke,” I say softly.

“She went out,” a voice calls, a middle-aged woman standing on the stoop across the street. Mrs. Veenstra, the woman whose son was missing in the country on the day Mirjam disappeared. Or not-Mirjam.

“Mrs. Janssen never goes out on her own.”

“I know that, but she did, about ten minutes ago. I told her I could pick up anything she needed, but she said she needed to go herself.”

“Did she say where?”

“No, but she looked upset. I figured she’d had bad news about one of her sons. Do you want to wait in my house until she comes back?

“I’ll just wait—” I’m about to say that I’ll just wait on her steps when I realize I never tried the doorknob. I surreptitiously twist it now, and the door pops open. Next door, Fritzi starts barking. “I’ll just wait inside. She’s expecting me anyway.”

Mrs. Veenstra looks uncertain. “I wanted to make sure I came today,” I babble pleasantly, trying to think of an excuse that will convince her I belong in this house. “You know, with Jan’s birthday. It’s probably why she’s so upset. I bet she’s at church.” I have no idea when Jan’s birthday is, but I doubt Mrs. Veenstra will remember any better than I do, and I hope she can’t sense how uncomfortable I am. A week ago, I was at this house, reminding myself how to behave on a social call. Now I’m reminding myself how to tell lies and excuses again. “Would you like me to pass on your thoughts as well?” I ask.

Finally she goes back into her own house, leaving me alone. Inside, Mrs. Janssen’s is quiet. A clock ticks. A half-drunk cup of ersatz tea sits on the kitchen table, next to a half-eaten slice of bread. Those are the only signs of human activity. I walk quickly through the rest of the house to be sure: the lonely bedrooms belonging to Mrs. Janssen’s sons; Mrs. Janssen’s own bedroom, smelling of rose perfume and something musty; Mr. Janssen’s home office, unused since his death. She’s nowhere.

My knee throbs. I still have Willem’s handkerchief tied around it, and drops of red have seeped through the white cotton. I rinse off the handkerchief in the kitchen sink and reapply it. I wonder if Mrs. Janssen has any aspirin powder and where she would keep it. Mama keeps ours in the pantry. The door to Mrs. Janssen’s is already ajar, and the secret latch is open, revealing the hiding place from behind the jars of pickles and radishes. Inside, the quilt on top of the opklapbed is wrinkled, with a faint depression in the middle. Mrs. Janssen must have come in here last night.

No amount of searching for aspirin powder or performing other menial tasks is going to be enough to distract me.

The timeline doesn’t reveal anything, no matter how many times I go over it. Four weeks ago, a girl appeared at the front door of this house, who may or may not have been Mirjam Roodveldt. One week ago, the same girl disappeared, and Mrs. Janssen hired me to find her. Two days ago, a girl was found in a raid and taken to the Hollandsche Schouwburg. I tried to help her escape. She was shot and killed. Was that girl the same one who knocked on Mrs. Janssen’s door? Or was it a different girl, one who had acquired Mirjam’s clothes and papers during the five days that Mirjam went missing?

Does any of this even matter anyway? There’s a girl who is dead.

“Hello?” Through several walls, I hear the front door creak open and someone call out. “Hello, Mrs. Janssen?”

I rush out of the pantry, hurling the door closed behind me. A young blond woman I’ve never seen before stands in the parlor, dressed in the clothes of a shopgirl or store clerk.

“Can I help you?”

“Oh!” She theatrically puts her hand to her chest. “Where’s Mrs. Janssen?”

“Who are you? What are you doing here?” I say, deciding the best way to avoid answering her question is to ask a ruder one of my own.

“I’m Tessa Koster. I work—I worked—for Mr. Janssen in the furniture shop. The door was ajar. Are you… Mrs. Janssen’s companion?” she guesses.

“Yes. Mrs. Janssen’s not here. Can I help you with something?”

“Oh, no. I came by to drop some things off for Mrs. Janssen, but I’ll come back later when she’s home.”

Tessa Koster smiles, flustered, and as she heads for the door again, I piece it together. The furniture shop employee. The one who was leaving on her honeymoon the day after the raid. “Photographs,” I say. “You brought photographs for Mrs. Janssen, from Mr. Janssen’s back room.”

She looks unnerved that I know this; for all she knows, I’m a spy sent to trap her. “Is Mrs. Janssen coming back soon? I really should talk to her.”

But I’m already shaking my head, looking as sympathetic as I can, because I want her to leave those photographs with me. “I don’t know when she’ll be back. I suppose you could come back tomorrow? You’re brave, walking around with those photographs, though. It sounded like they were sort of”—I bring my voice down to a whisper and continue—“illicit.”

“I’ll—I’ll be fine.”

“Did you ever meet the family who was in hiding?” I ask, letting her see I know more than she guessed I did. “The daughter? Mirjam.”

“No, I didn’t. You knew about that?” She looks back toward the door.

“Are you sure you never saw them? They were there for several months. You must have suspected something.” Mrs. Koster averts her eyes, staring down at the new wedding band on her finger, and I have a new, ugly suspicion.

“Mrs. Koster. Were you the one who told the police that Mr. Janssen was hiding people in his back room? Did you report him to the Nazis?”

“Listen.” Her eyes dart to the side. “I don’t approve of what Mr. Janssen was doing, but I didn’t tell on him. I didn’t even know about it. I came into work, and the raid had already happened. These were in the back room; they had blood on them, so I took them home to clean them up, and then Mrs. Janssen wrote me a letter saying she wanted them. That’s really all the involvement I want to have. Can I leave them with you? And then I don’t have to come back again.”

She digs in her handbag, blond curls falling in her face, and eventually produces a paper envelope. “Here. Take them.”

I pretend to consider it. “Are you sure? You’re not going to wait?”

She thrusts the paper in my hand. “Take them.”

Once I see her out the door, I take the packet of photographs back into the kitchen. I’m not rushing this time. I’m infinitely precise. I’m infinitely patient as I sit down at the table, lay the envelope squarely in front of me, moving with an emotion it takes me a while to identify. Dread.

Most of the blood has been wiped from the photographs; only a few traces remain, making the corners of the pictures stick together when I peel them apart. I lay them one by one in front of me, a row stretching across the table, this gluey narrative of a family and life and death.

Here are Mr. and Mrs. Roodveldt, I presume, cradling a baby in a white dress, behind a table with a cake on it. A birthday. Here’s one from a few years earlier: Mrs. Roodveldt’s bridal portrait, her eyes lowered, a lace veil covering her hair and a small bouquet of lilacs in her hands.

The photographs skip back and forth in years, and the family marches across the kitchen table unstuck from time, beaming at me from their happiest moments. Parties. Holidays. A new apartment, a new baby, a different one from the first time.

And here is one with two teenage girls with their arms around each other. The girl on the left has dark curly hair, a faint birthmark on her chin, and long, lush eyelashes. Her eyes—which I’ve only really seen closed, on Mr. Kreuk’s table—are large and expressive.

The girl on the right is slightly taller, also with dark hair, her mouth open in laughter. She’s wearing a paper birthday crown. I’ve never seen her before.

With shaking hands, I turn the picture over: Amalia and Mirjam at Mirjam’s 14th birthday.

⋯⋯⋯

There are so many things I wish I could forget. The hard parts. The nasty injuries, beneath the scarred skin, the things I’d like to disappear by ignoring.

———

The last time I saw Elsbeth, before I sneaked into her house:

It was a few months after the day in my bedroom when I told her I wished Rolf were dead instead of Bas.

She came to my house again. She had two wedding invitations, one for me and one for my parents. She awkwardly accepted tea from my mother and answered questions about her dress and the flowers at the church. When my mother left us alone “so we could catch up,” Elsbeth turned to me.

“My mother said I should invite you,” she said finally. “She said weddings mend fences. But I’m guessing you won’t want to come.” I couldn’t figure out the emotion in her eyes: Hope? Anger? Was she wishing that I would come, or was she making it clear that she wanted my answer to be no?

“No,” I said. “I don’t expect I’ll come.”

“All right, then,” she said. “I guess this really probably is goodbye.”

It was so dignified. That was what made it so sad. To end a twelveyear friendship like this, while she sat in my kitchen with a wedding invitation in her hand. It was nearly unforgivable, and I’ve spent the past year wondering whether it was more or less unforgivable than the person Elsbeth wanted to marry, and which one of us should apologize to whom.

There are so many ways to kill things, it turns out. The Germans killed Bas with mortar. Elsbeth and I killed our friendship with words.

THIRTY-TWO

———

My heart has come loose from my chest.

Amalia. Amalia.

Amalia was the girl who Ollie brought to Mr. Kreuk’s in the quiet of night. Amalia is the girl who is dead in the ground. The girl I have been looking for this whole time. The photograph of the birthday party is sticky in my hand; without meaning to I’ve left fingerprints all over it, touching the faces of these dead and disappeared girls.

In the other room, I hear the front door open again, letting in a whistle of air. Mrs. Janssen? But I don’t hear the soft bump of her cane. It must be Tessa Koster again.

“I’m back here,” I call out. My voice is a croak.

“Mrs. Janssen?” a confused voice asks. “It’s Christoffel.”

“Oh, Christoffel, it’s Hanneke.” Reflexively, I sweep the photographs off the table, folding them back into the envelope they came in. I’ve just stuck the packet under the tea set when Christoffel enters the kitchen. He’s still wearing the formal clothes he wore to escort Mrs. Janssen to the funeral earlier today.

“Where’s Mrs. Janssen?” He uses his sleeve to wipe perspiration off his forehead. “When I stopped by a little bit ago, she said she needed me to take her somewhere. I told her I had to do another quick errand and I’d be right back.”

“Mrs. Janssen…” I trail off. I’m having a difficult time finishing my sentences. Was Amalia imprisoned in the Hollandsche Schouwburg? Amalia, Mirjam’s best friend? Amalia, who was supposed to be in Kijkduin? Vaguely, I realize Christoffel is still waiting for me to finish my sentence. “Mrs. Janssen was gone when I got here, too. Did she tell you where she wanted you to take her?”

He wrinkles his eyebrows. “She said she needed to go see you. But you’re here. It sounded urgent; she was upset when I told her I couldn’t go right away.”

“Right. Right. I guess she and I got a little mixed up about who was coming to see whom.” Dammit. I should have told Mrs. Janssen on the phone to stay put, no matter what. But I don’t know how she would have gone to see me; Mrs. Janssen doesn’t know where I live. I don’t even think she knows my last name. If Christoffel wasn’t here, I could go through the house to see if she left me a note somewhere, explaining more.

“It sounded like she was really worried about something,” Christoffel says. “I’ll wait here until she gets back.”

“I’m sure you have better things to do, Christoffel. Why don’t I give you some money for your trouble, and you can get back to your life?”

But, irritatingly dutiful, he takes the other seat at the table, fiddling with one of the teacups. Minutes tick by. When Mrs. Janssen couldn’t find me, what would she do next? Something rash? Would she try to go find Mr. Kreuk? Or Ollie? How much have I told her about him, and the resistance?

“Do you really think it’s all right if I leave? I do have another place I’m supposed to be,” he admits finally.

“Of course you should leave. I’ll tell her you stopped by.” Even the scraping of my chair sounds eager as I usher him out of his seat.

“Did I leave my hat?” he starts to ask, looking around his seat.

“Here,” I say, exasperated, thrusting the gray cap at him that he’d set on the table.

We’re almost out of the room when a squeak emits from the pantry, an un-oiled, plaintive sound. Verdorie. I remembered to shut the outer pantry door when Tessa Koster came in, but I don’t think I locked the secret shelf inside. It must be swinging, loose, behind the closed door. “Old houses make the strangest sounds,” I say.

We’re at the front door now. All I have to do is shove him through it, and then I can figure out where Mrs. Janssen is. I’ll start with Mr. Kreuk. That’s who introduced us to begin with. Mr. Kreuk handled the memorial service for her husband.

“Next time I come I’ll bring some oil,” says Christoffel as I open the door for him. “That shelf always squeaks when the latch is open.”

And.

He doesn’t even realize what he’s said. He doesn’t realize it at all. It was just a sentence to him. A string of words, a helpful comment. He’s putting on his cap. The door is open.

Slowly, like I’m watching my own actions in a dream, I close the door again, and it shuts with a whisper of a click.

“Hanneke?”

The shelf always squeaks when the latch is open. I replay the sentence again in my mind, searching for a way that it could mean something different from what I know it means. Shelf. He didn’t say “pantry door.” He specifically said “shelf.” He would have to know that the shelf swung open with a latch. Always. As in, multiple times. As in, he knows the workings of that hidden, rusty shelf.

“Hanneke, I thought you said I should leave.” He’s looking at me, confused.

“You know about the hiding space.” My voice comes out in an uneven whisper. “Christoffel?” He starts to shake his head, but it’s too late. A light has flickered in his eyes. “What do you know about it, Christoffel?” I ask softly.

“I don’t know anything. Please let’s not talk about this. Please just let me go.”

He reaches for the doorknob again, but I move in front of it. “I can’t let you go. You know that.”

“Hanneke, please leave this.” His voice is so quiet I can barely make it out.

Outside I hear someone selling an evening newspaper, and the gritty, swishing sound of a broom over cobblestones. Life is going on and on, and I’m in here with a soft-faced boy who is drained of all color. “Christoffel, it’s just the two of us in here. No matter what you tell me, good or bad, I can’t ever call the police or talk to anybody but Mrs. Janssen about it. But please, please, just tell me: How did you know there was a space behind the pantry?”

Outside the sweeper has landed on something metal, maybe a coin. Christoffel stares at his thumb, at a vicious hangnail rubbed red from repeated worrying. He’s an inch or two taller than me, but it’s gangly height, the height of a recent growth spurt.

“I didn’t know about—about her,” he says. “Not at first. I swear, I didn’t know at first. Usually when I’m here, Mrs. Janssen is in the room with me, and we’re talking or making noise that would cover up sounds from the pantry.”

“But not all the time?”

“One time I was delivering some things. Mrs. Janssen couldn’t find her pocketbook. She went upstairs to look for it, and she was gone for a long time, and down here it was quiet. And I heard something. A squeak.”

“Did you go to see what it was?” That would be so like helpful Christoffel, to hear a rusty hinge and decide to investigate it, repair it.

“I didn’t have to. I heard the squeak, and then she came out of the cupboard.”

Another person who saw her. Another person who knew she existed. Christoffel’s face has a touch of wonder to it, as he remembers that moment. How strange it must have been for him, to be standing in the kitchen and have a girl emerge from the pantry. “She recognized my voice,” Christoffel continues. “She said she’d just been waiting for an opportunity when Mrs. Janssen wasn’t around.”

She recognized. It’s like my brain can’t take in everything Christoffel is saying at once, so it latches on to loose phrases, here or there. Recognize is an interesting word. It would have made more sense for Christoffel to say “heard.” We recognize the things that are already familiar to us.

“You knew her,” I say, and as I’m formulating the words, I decide who “her” really was. “You knew Amalia.”

“How did you know her name?”

“How did you?”

“We went to school together. The three of us, we grew up together. Me, Amalia, and—” Christoffel leaves a space where the name should go, one that I can’t resist filling.

“And Mirjam.”

“And Mirjam,” he whispers. Then Christoffel does something I didn’t expect at all and hadn’t been prepared for. He sinks to the floor, sliding down along the wall. He balls his fists in front of his eyes, and he begins to cry. Not just silent tears: fat, noisy tears like a little boy.

I drop to my knees next to him. This is pain I recognize. “Christoffel, did you—did you love Mirjam?”

His throat is hoarse; he’s barely whispering. “She didn’t seem to notice me that way; she treated me like a brother. I assumed she didn’t like me. Last year she told me it wasn’t that she didn’t like me, it was that Amalia did. She said Amalia liked me first, and Mirjam didn’t want to betray her. I knew deep down, all along, I guess. Amalia started getting nervous around me. She got this laugh—a giggle, sort of. But I never thought of her as more than a friend.”

“You’re T. Not Tobias. You.” Christoffel looks up at me, confused. “I found a letter,” I explain. “It mentioned a boy whose name she abbreviated as T. It was a boy she liked.”

Those stupid English princesses. The letter wasn’t from Mirjam to Amalia, something she never got a chance to send. The letter was from Amalia to Mirjam, something Mirjam was rereading in class.

“My nickname,” Christoffel says. “It’s dumb. I don’t even remember when I got it. I guess that I must have been T.”

Earlier, I thought Christoffel’s friends at the ferry were all calling him Mr. Great. That’s what Tof means: “Great.” “Cool.” But they weren’t calling him that—they were calling him Tof, his nickname, from the middle of Christoffel.

“How many times did you see Amalia in the pantry?”

“Just twice. The second time I came, she waited until Mrs. Janssen was gone again, and then she said there had been a notice in the newspaper and that she needed my help to escape.”

Het Parool. The three-line notice in the classifieds: Elizabeth misses her Margaret, but is glad to be vacationing in Kijkduin.

The first day I came here, Mrs. Janssen told me she brought Mirjam a newspaper, and then told her to stay quiet because the delivery boy was coming. Mrs. Janssen never mentioned to me that she had left Christoffel alone in the kitchen. She wouldn’t have thought she needed to. Why would Mirjam announce her presence to the boy who came to deliver groceries?

“You helped her escape?”

“I did.”

“But I don’t understand. She must have told you that Mrs. Janssen thought she was Mirjam. Why would she leave without telling Mrs. Janssen that she was going? And how was Amalia carrying Mirjam’s papers on the night of the raid?”

He kneads the palm of his hand into his eye, clumsily wiping away tears. I don’t have a handkerchief, and I don’t know if I would offer him one if I did. Am I comforting him? Interrogating him? This boy in front of me has the answer to every question I’ve been chasing for a week. He helped launch a series of events that caused pain and anguish, and I still don’t understand why.

“She—she told me that the night the Roodveldts’ hiding space was ransacked, she ran into Mirjam on the street,” he says. “Mirjam was running for her life and she thought she would be caught soon. Amalia made her switch coats and identification papers. Amalia said that if Mirjam had nonJewish papers, she would be able to escape, and Amalia could just go to the authorities later and be issued new ones. But the soldiers were too close. She didn’t have time to run home, and she worried that with Mirjam’s clothes and papers, she would be shot on sight. So she came to Mrs. Janssen’s. Mirjam told her the address.”

“But when she got here, why didn’t she tell Mrs. Janssen who she really was? Why didn’t she ask Mrs. Janssen to help her get new papers?”

He shrugs morosely. “I don’t know. She just said she didn’t want Mrs. Janssen to know.”

Because she wanted to make sure Mirjam was safe before she told anyone the truth? Because she didn’t want anyone to know the real Mirjam Roodveldt was still out there, escaped, living under a different name? Because there are some parts of this story that are never going to make sense, no matter how many questions I ask?

“Where did she go?” I ask. “After you got her out of the house?”

“She stayed with me for a while. Papa travels so often he didn’t suspect someone was in the basement.”

In his basement. Until just a few days ago, the girl I was looking for was living at the home of a boy I’d seen multiple times.

“What made her leave?” I ask. I can understand why Amalia never went to the authorities and said her own papers were lost or stolen: Since she was under eighteen, the authorities might have demanded her parents’ signatures, and they were already out of the city. I can understand why she might have wanted to stay with Christoffel instead of Mrs. Janssen—an old friend rather than a stranger who didn’t even know who she really was. What I can’t understand is why, after she’d gone through all that trouble, she would then leave his house. “Why did she keep running from the places she was safest, Christoffel? I just need some of these pieces to make sense.” He’s still crying, tears flowing faster as I demand answers. “Why did Amalia leave your house that night?”

“I told her to,” he finally yelps. “She told me a secret and I made her leave. I never meant for her to die. I swear I never meant it. I was so mad at her. I told her the Nazis would treat her better than I would if I ever saw her again. I chased her to the street. She was running away from me; I saw her run face-on into a soldier. When she was caught in the roundup, she was running away from me.” His voice is high and keening.

“What was the secret? What was it that made you refuse to let her stay in your house?”

“I can’t. I can’t.” He’s become hysterical; if I had a paper bag, I would make him breathe into it. Instead, I pat the back of his sweater, damp with sweat and heaving as he gulps in air. He’s just a few years younger than me, but he’s a small boy right now. “I don’t want to talk about that,” he gasps out in between deep breaths. “Please don’t make me.”

“Okay. Okay. Okay,” I repeat, because pushing him right now is only going to send him further over the edge.

Just one thing more. Not even a thing that matters, in the large scheme of things, but something I have to have settled, for my own peace.

“You said Amalia asked you to help her escape on the day she saw the notice in the newspaper. But you couldn’t have helped her right then. Mrs. Janssen saw her later in the evening. Did you find a way to sneak back in the house while Mrs. Janssen was across the street at her neighbor’s? Were you the one who figured out how to close the back door from the outside?”

“No. She hid in the house while Mrs. Janssen was at the neighbor’s. I came back the next day.”

His timeline must be off. The next day, I was here. The next day, I was sitting in the kitchen listening to Mrs. Janssen tell me Mirjam had already disappeared. “You’re misremembering. I was here that day. I saw you come in. You were picking up some furniture to sell for Mrs. Janssen.”

“I did do that. I did pick up the furniture.”

Christoffel is silent. I am silent.

He’s allowing me this, this one kindness, the ability to put the final pieces together myself. If I don’t want to, I can tell Mrs. Janssen that it was Amalia in the pantry and now she’s dead, and it will be true, and how she escaped won’t matter. Or I can put the pieces together and everything will hurt more.

I have to put them together. Because without even meaning to, I’m remembering the way Mina cheerfully handed me a baby’s bag filled with firewood and I carried it on my shoulder for more than a kilometer without realizing that I was transporting an important part of their ruse. I’m remembering the fact that the carriage was really a camera. I’m remembering the fact that Ollie didn’t love me or Judith; he loved Willem. I’m remembering the fact that nothing in this war is what it seems, and I have spent too much of it not seeing what’s in front of my own face.

Amalia was folded up in the opklapbed. Christoffel rolled it out of the house on his pushcart. While I was trying to figure out whether I should help Mrs. Janssen find her missing onderduiker, she wasn’t missing at all. She was just a few feet away.

“She was waiting in the opklapbed for you to sneak her away. That was the plan all along.”

I am weary. He is weary. We both want this to be over, finally, completely. “She waited for hours,” he said. “She let herself sit in the office while Mrs. Janssen slept, but once she heard Mrs. Janssen wake up, she climbed back in. I told her I would come as early as I could in the morning.”

“And then you left. With her. While I sat here. Did you know I had been hired to find her?”

“A friend asked me for help,” he says finally. “That’s what I was thinking about.”

I try to figure out how to respond. Should I tell him about Mrs. Janssen’s desperation when she first learned the girl in the pantry was gone? Should I tell him about what it looked like when Amalia’s knees buckled and she crashed to the ground?

In the silence, he’s crying again.

“Shhhhh,” I say to him. “Shhhhh,” because it’s what people said to me when I cried about Bas and because, at this moment, there aren’t any other words.

THIRTY-THREE

———

Saturday

When things come to an end in a way you don’t expect, in a way you never could have imagined, do they really come to an end? Does it mean you should keep searching, for better answers, for ones that don’t keep you up at night? Or does it mean it’s time to make peace?

It takes me two days to find a space on a train to Kijkduin.

The train goes to Den Haag first, a city that seems like it’s swarming with even more German soldiers than Amsterdam. I transfer to Kijkduin, a suburb on the sea, and as the train gets closer, the air becomes briny. Today I’m the only person to get off at this station, holding my small suitcase, looking like a mad vacationer who has elected to come to the sea in the middle of winter. My hair is whipped by the wind coming off the water, and my eyes burn in the salty cold. The town had been a resort destination, new and planned, for only a decade or so before the invasion. Now the beach has a fort near it, taken over by Germans and used for training.

“Here you are.” The bicyclist coasts to a stop, and he nods to a cluster of buildings across the street. The middle one is pale green.

I thank him and smooth down my skirt. Amalia’s aunt’s guesthouse has a painted porch and a cheerful sign hanging out front, assuring guests that they’re open for the winter. I know what’s behind this door, or I think I do, at least, but I still feel like an interloper. I didn’t send any word before I came. I’d dealt enough in speculation and fog this week; I wanted proof I could see. The black marketer in me, I guess, seeking reassurance and finding value in the tangible world.

When I knock on the door, a middle-aged woman answers eagerly. Offseason business can’t be easy to come by, especially not since the Germans have blocked so much of the coastline with barriers against the invading Allies.

“Are you interested in a room?” The woman I assume is Amalia’s aunt is already extending her hand to take my suitcase. “Come in. There’s a fire going in the parlor, and I’ll fix you something to eat.”

I follow her inside and think of what I should say and how much I should tell her. I didn’t come with any script today, either. What I’d come to do, after all I’d experienced, seemed too real for games.

In the end, this is what I told Mrs. Janssen, when she came home that day at her house: I told her that the girl she sent me to look for was dead, but the girl she wanted me to find might not be. I told her that I could never bring back the girl who she had grown to love over several weeks of hiding, but that I might be able to find the girl whose family was all gone, just like Mrs. Janssen’s son and husband were gone. I showed her the picture, and I told her that I knew it didn’t make sense. I told her I would try to find a way for it to make sense, but it maybe never could. I told her I was sorry.

Christoffel refused to tell her anything. He left before Mrs. Janssen returned. He said he couldn’t handle the guilt. I wanted to tell him a lot of things: How he’d caused destruction. How he’d been unthinking. How he needed to give me Amalia’s secret. But when he said he was crumbling under the guilt, I couldn’t bring myself to say any of that. Because I understood what that felt like. Because I’d spent more than two years and all of a war feeling that myself, certain that my actions had caused the death of someone important to me.

“A room, then?” The woman is still waiting for me to respond.

“I’m interested in—” I’m still not sure what to say. Should I ask for Amalia straightaway? Or should I wait until I have a room, and I’ve come down for dinner around a cozy fire? But it turns out I don’t have to worry about it, because all at once, there she is.

A girl a few years younger than me, petite, fine-featured, comes down the stairs carrying an armful of linens. On her right shin, visible even in the dimness of the indoor light, a thin pink scar jags down from her knee.

“Amalia,” the older woman instructs. “It looks like we’re going to have a guest tonight. Can you show her up to room three?” She turns to me and winks. “It’s the largest we have, with the most comfortable bed.”

She’s changed a little from her birthday picture. She’s older in the face, and her body has curves that the girl in the picture didn’t. I let her take my suitcase, this dream girl come to life in front of me, and follow her up to the second floor. Upstairs, room three is decorated in pale blues and seashells, and the window is opened a few inches so the sea air can come in, even in the cold.

“We serve dinner at six,” she says, the first time she’s spoken to me. Her voice is lower-pitched than I expected. “It’s not fancy, but there’s usually fresh fish.”

“I know.” This is what escapes from my mouth. Not a grand speech, but the simple declaration I’ve waited days to deliver.

She smiles. “Have you been here before, then?”

I shake my head, and her name breaks from my mouth. “Mirjam. Mirjam, I know.”

Color drains from Mirjam’s face. She looks over her shoulder, seeing if anyone heard the secret name. The door behind her is closed. The streets outside are empty. “Who are you?”

“I wrote you a letter. I folded it into a star.”

“I never got a letter.”

Of course, Christoffel would have passed it to the real Amalia, not the girl pretending to be her in an inn by the ocean. “I’ve been looking for you,” I say, and then I realize that if she never got the letter, she doesn’t know any of what happened, and I am going to have to be the one to tell her, from the beginning.

It takes me a long time to explain everything: Christoffel, Amalia, the Nazis, the bridge. I keep repeating the things she doesn’t seem to understand, because she assumed Amalia would be coming to visit her soon. She assumed Amalia was safe. She listens to me with a frozen, stunned expression and her lower teeth biting her upper lip, a habit I never imagined for Mirjam. I spent a week trying to learn about this girl, but I really don’t know her at all. Everything I heard was an amalgamation of her and Amalia. I knew people’s memories of each of them, and I stitched them together to form a person, but it’s a different person than the one standing in front of me.

Mirjam sinks down in a chair next to the doorway. “Are you sure?” she asks when I’ve finished. “Could you have made a mistake?”

It’s the same thing I asked Ollie, when he told me someone named Roodveldt had arrived in the theater, wanting deeply for there to have been a mistake.

“I’m sure. She died because she was acting like she was you,” I say. I didn’t mean for it to sound harsh. I said it because I’m still trying, so desperately, to understand how it happened.

Her eyes fill with tears. “Have you ever had a best friend?”

I nod. My throat is tight. “Once. Not anymore.”

“Then you know. You know what it’s like to love someone like you love yourself and then lose them.”

I don’t know whether to leave her with her grief or to push on, but I’ve come this far and I can’t help wanting to go further. “What happened on that night, Mirjam? The night you changed places?”

She drops her head. She doesn’t want to tell me, or she doesn’t want to remember, and for a while I think she’s not going to answer me at all.

“We only had a few minutes. I was running from the furniture store. I didn’t know where I was going, and then Amalia was there, with me, in the street. She was already crying; her hair was undone and her blouse was untucked, and when she saw me, she grabbed me so hard I could barely breathe. It was before curfew, and the streets were so busy with people rushing home that nobody paid attention to us. I told her what happened—that my family was dead—and she didn’t even have to think before she took off her coat. She said that I would become her, that there were identification papers in the pocket, and money. She was supposed to be on a train that night anyway. To come here. The ticket was already booked. Her aunt hadn’t seen her since she was a child. So she told me to go to her aunt’s house, and then she promised that she would never reveal where I was or what had happened until I told her it was safe.”

“And that was it?”

“Almost.” She looks at me again, but her eyes are harder now, somehow, closed off and protective.

It’s the almost that keeps stopping me, that has stopped me all week. I’ve had so many occasions of thinking I almost understood something only to realize I didn’t understand anything at all.

“Mirjam, Amalia had a secret. She told it to Christoffel. It’s why he made her leave his house. It made him so angry that Amalia was afraid of him. Do you know what it was? What Amalia could have told him that would have upset Christoffel so much that he sent her away from a place where she was safe?”

She pinches her lips and looks away. “I don’t know anything.”

“Please, I’m just trying to understand what happened. You have no idea how badly people wanted to find you. Mrs. Janssen would have given anything to know what happened.”

She wants to tell me. I can tell that she wants this to be done with as much as I do, so that we can all start over.

“Mirjam. You said Amalia was already crying when she ran into you. Why would she already be crying? Why was she out that night to begin with?”

Tell me. Tell me and let us be done with this.

Slowly, deliberately, Mirjam reaches into a pocket on her dress. She pulls out something shaped like a star. “In Amalia’s coat pocket, when we traded. In the pocket was the money to come here. And also this.”

I take it from her and unfold the flaps. Mirjam rises from her chair and goes to stand by the window, looking out into the sea.

Dearest Elizabeth,

Forgive me. Forgive me. Forgive me even though I have done something you shouldn’t forgive me for.

I’m writing this on the tram, and if I get to you in time, I won’t have to give this to you at all. This is just in case. A just-in-case letter.

T and I have become close while you’re away. He listens when I talk.

He laughs at my jokes. It’s like he really sees me, for the first time, and I know you wouldn’t mind, because you never loved him like I did, because you always said that you wished he felt about me the way he felt about you. And I thought he was starting to love me back. But he wasn’t. He wasn’t, because this afternoon he looked at me and said, “You should wear your hair like Mirjam’s. Hers is so pretty. When the war is over, maybe she’ll show you.” And I could see in his face that he was never going to love me, not ever.

I’m telling you this because I want you to understand that I was heartbroken. Even though it’s not an excuse, I want you to understand that I was heartbroken when I got home and my uncle was visiting and he asked me why I was looking so blue. I want you to understand that I wasn’t thinking when I told him that I was blue because the boy I loved would rather pine after a girl who had to hide in a furniture shop until the war was over than be with me. My uncle laughed. He told me the boy was dumb. He asked me to tell him more about this girl. I did. I told him all about you. I forgot he’d joined the NSB.

Or did I? Dearest Elizabeth, I’ve been thinking about this from the moment I realized what he’d done, from the moment I ran for the tram. Did I really forget that he joined the NSB? Or did part of me remember and know exactly what I was doing? I’m going to try to stop this. I’m going to fix it if I can. Forgive me. Forgive me. Forgive me.

“She turned you in,” I say. “She was the reason the Nazis raided your hiding space.”

Mirjam turns to face me. “Didn’t you see? She regretted it almost as soon as she realized what had happened. That was why she was out that night in the street. She was running to warn us all that she’d told. She was hoping there would still be time for us to run.”

“But it was too late.”

Mirjam’s eyes are webbed with tears. I can’t even imagine what it must have been like that night. Two best friends meeting on the street to say so many things at once: I betrayed you, I love you, I want to save you, I’m sorry. All around Europe, people are dying by the hundreds of thousands. And here, in my city, the Nazis slaughtered a family because of events that started with love and jealousy and a slip of the tongue.

“You’ll want to hate her.” Mirjam stares down at her folded hands. “I did. More than I ever hated anybody. But she didn’t know. I have to believe that now. When she told her uncle, I think she did it without realizing what could happen. She didn’t mean to.” She looks up at me with enormous eyes. “Do you believe me when I say that?”

“I believe that if you believe that,” I say.

I don’t know why Mirjam should care, if I think well of Amalia or not. She doesn’t even know me.

Except that, it occurs to me, I would care if it were me or my friends. All of us—Bas, Elsbeth, Ollie, me—I would care that someone understood we were flawed and scarred and doing the best we could in this war. We were wrapped up in things that were so much bigger than ourselves. We didn’t know. We didn’t mean it. It wasn’t our fault.

Mirjam goes to the bed and sits, and I sit beside her, and neither of us says anything. We just stare out the window as waves batter the barricaded shore.

THIRTY-FOUR

———

In the end, I don’t stay the night at Amalia’s aunt’s hotel. Mirjam doesn’t know me well enough for me to be a comfort to her, and after a while I realize I don’t know what to say. I tell her I’ll go back to Amsterdam, where she would have a home with Mrs. Janssen if she wanted it, but in truth it’s probably better for her to stay here until the war is over, tucked away in a guestless hotel with safe papers.

I walk back toward the railway station and pester the station agent until he gets me a spot on the next train back to Amsterdam. The woman in the seat next to me whispers that the Battle of Stalingrad is over and the Nazis lost—their first official surrender of the war.

“Thank God,” I say, which I soon realize is taking a chance: If she’s a collaborator, my response should have been neutral or despair. But she’s not, because she reaches down and furtively squeezes my hand, a shared gratefulness. And then we’re done talking, because neither of us knows who could be listening, and we keep to ourselves as the train heads home. I feel tired. More so than I would have expected, after so much resolution. Maybe we can’t barter our feelings away, trading good deeds for bad ones and expecting to become whole.

When I get home, Mama and Papa will ask where I’ve been. I’ll go and have dinner with Ollie and Willem and Sanne and Leo. I’ll visit Mina when I can. My heart will still ache sometimes. Maybe more often than not. I think it’s possible to be healed without feeling whole.

I found a girl who wasn’t the girl I was looking for. I let go of a friend I’ll still miss every day. I’ll go back to work. I’ll get better. I’ll get better slowly. I’ll find all the secret, hidden things.

⋯⋯⋯

The first time I realized I loved Bas:

He was sixteen, I was fifteen. It wasn’t the afternoon in his house when we listened to the radio. That was when he realized he loved me. I actually realized it the week before. It was in the school yard. Someone was saying how they liked to read the last pages of books first, to make sure everyone turned out okay. Bas said that was the dumbest thing he’d ever heard. Bas ordered that the book in question be passed to him, and when it was, he flipped to the back page, took out a pencil and started writing on it. I thought he would write Everyone turned out okay, but when he passed the book back, he’d actually written, Everyone was mauled by a bear, it was very sad, let’s go get ice cream.

Then he grabbed my hand, pulled me up from where I’d been sitting, and said, “Maybe the bear didn’t maul you. He just scratched you a little bit.” Then I made a face, and then he kissed me, and then we walked to get ice cream, in a relationship at its beautiful beginning, in a world that was closer to the end than we ever knew.