Charlotte held his gaze. “He’s the best.”
The air around them seemed to freeze. Then he leaned in and his lips landed softly on hers. When he pulled away—too soon—his cheeks were splotched with red. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m not.”
“I—I have to go.” Lucien stood up. His face was still flushed, and he looked nervous. “I’ll see what I can do.” He kissed her once more, on the cheek, and then he was gone, shutting the door quietly behind him.
Charlotte sat in the living room long after Lucien had departed, thinking about a future that would quite possibly never come. She knew she couldn’t tell Ruby; Ruby would say she was too young to be having these feelings for a boy. Ruby still saw Charlotte as a child, no matter what Charlotte did to prove otherwise—and she was wary of Lucien. “How would your parents feel about you getting involved with a forger like him?” Ruby had said once.
“I’d like to think they’d be proud,” Charlotte had replied.
But the truth was, Charlotte didn’t know what her parents would think. Lucien wasn’t Jewish, and she knew that both Maman and Papa had always imagined she would follow in their footsteps, marry a good Jewish boy, raise good Jewish children.
Then again, the world Maman and Papa had dreamed of was long gone. Maybe the only thing to do was to follow her heart.
ONE NIGHT IN LATE JULY, Charlotte and Ruby were sitting on the small terrace of the apartment on the rue de Lasteyrie. Charlotte’s parents had been gone for a year, and there’d been no word of their whereabouts since they departed from Drancy. The roundups in Paris had slowed, and the city had fallen into a strange rhythm of false normalcy. Parisians went about their daily business, heads down, while the Nazis lounged in cafés and strolled the grand avenues as if the city had been theirs all along. Just last week, though, Lucien had brought news that twenty-one Jewish families had been arrested on the Boulevard Beaumarchais for no reason at all; the police had simply swept in and carted them away, sobbing and screaming, children and all. Charlotte knew such things would continue to happen, and that even with her cover as Ruby’s Christian cousin, she was always in danger.
The risks had made Ruby into a bit of an oppressor, actually. Charlotte knew that her friend was just worried about her, but it was difficult living with someone whose protection felt so burdensome. Ruby forbade her from going out at all now, insisting that Charlotte was much safer in the apartment, where no one could see her and get suspicious. But it was summertime in Paris, and Charlotte longed to stroll the streets, smell the flowers, feel the grass beneath her feet. Then again, it wasn’t the Paris of Charlotte’s childhood anymore. And as long as Ruby was protecting her—and as long as Ruby herself seemed so miserable—Charlotte felt she had no choice but to respect her wishes, even if the confinement filled her with loneliness and longing.
“Do you think of your parents often?” Charlotte asked abruptly as twilight fell over the city. The sky in Paris turned an almost magical shade of blue most nights, especially in the summer. The French had always called it l’heure bleue, and Charlotte had been startled to learn from Ruby that across the Atlantic, Americans didn’t feel the same way about the final hour of daylight. Perhaps the sky was more beautiful here than it was anywhere else, but Charlotte had begun to doubt that. Surely there was something better out there. Besides, the blue hour had also come to mean something else; it was what the French called the end of innocence at the dawn of the Great War. Charlotte hadn’t been alive then, but she thought she understood now what France had lost.
“My parents?” Ruby asked. “Why yes. I do. Very often.”
“But you never speak of them.”
Ruby didn’t say anything for a moment. “It is painful for me, Charlotte,” she said at last. “I think often of how cruel I was to simply leave them behind.”
“You weren’t cruel to leave, Ruby. You were living your life. I’m certain your parents would have wanted that for you. You couldn’t have foreseen what was to come.”
“But I should have. My father always spoke of the instability in Europe. I thought he was just being overly cautious.”
Charlotte didn’t reply. She was thinking about her own parents, who had so steadfastly refused to leave Paris. If her father had listened, she might be with them in the Unoccupied Zone right now. Or perhaps they would have secured safe passage out of the country, to Spain or the United States. “Sometimes, though, our parents are wrong. That is why it is up to us to forge our own paths.”
Ruby turned to look at her. “Do you think of your parents often too, Charlotte?”
“Every day.” The sky was turning darker now, and Charlotte wondered what it looked like in the east, in the place her parents had been sent. “But I think they are dead by now.”
“Charlotte! What would make you say such a thing?”
“Lucien has told me what goes on in the concentration camps.” She wouldn’t repeat it aloud. She couldn’t. “My mother has always had a weak constitution. I can’t imagine she could tolerate the conditions Lucien has described. And my father, he has such a firm sense of right and wrong. I can’t believe so much time could have gone by without him standing up for someone at the risk of his own life.”
“But there’s still a chance.”
“I haven’t heard anything from them in a year. I must brace for the worst.” There was no official word from the east of course. It wasn’t as if the Nazis politely sent back death notices. But sometimes, loss could be felt in one’s bones.
“You can’t lose hope, Charlotte.”
“But you have, haven’t you?” Charlotte spoke before thinking, and Ruby flinched. “I can see it. You feel like you don’t matter anymore.”
Ruby rose slowly and crossed to the edge of the terrace, where she gazed into the distance. “Even after I lost the baby, I was able to find a purpose to my life. But who am I now? I don’t know anymore.”
“You’re my family,” Charlotte said. Ruby turned and looked at her, and Charlotte went on. “You’re my family, Ruby,” she repeated more firmly. “I wouldn’t have survived without you. Don’t you see that?”
“But there will come a time when you won’t need me anymore,” Ruby said. “And then what?”
That night, Charlotte couldn’t sleep. To say aloud that she believed her parents were dead felt like a betrayal. But now that she had, well, it was all she could think about. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw Maman’s face, or Papa’s. They reached out to her, begging her to save them, but there was nothing she could do. She’d had her chance, and she’d failed. She began to cry, and once she started, she found she couldn’t stop.
Just past midnight, something pinged off the frame of her open window. She slid out of bed, peered into the dark courtyard, and blinked a few times as her eyes adjusted to the darkness.
“Charlotte?” The voice from below was a whisper, but she recognized it immediately.
“Lucien?”
“You are crying,” he replied.
She could barely see him in the darkness, and she was glad, for it meant he couldn’t see the way her cheeks were flaming. “I’m fine. What are you doing here?”
He didn’t answer her question. “Meet me at your door.”
She heard a rustling below, and then he was gone. She stayed paralyzed for a moment. He had never called on her this late before, and certainly never once she was in her nightgown. Ruby would be furious if she found out. But Charlotte had to see him. She crept quietly to the front door of the apartment.
Lucien was already there, and as she stepped aside to let him in, he pulled her into his arms. He kissed her on both cheeks, tenderly. “You taste like salt,” he murmured.
“What are you doing here, Lucien?”
“I heard you. You sounded sad.”