“You can tell me anything, sweetheart. Anything at—”

His next words were drowned by the whine of aircraft and a series of muffled booms.

“Air raid,” Lisette said. “My God—”

He hobbled outside and looked around. “There’s too much ground fog. That’s bad. They won’t be able to see the landing zone.”

“Hank, what is happening?”

“You need to run for cover. The Allied invasion is starting.”

Part 5

Aix-en-Provence

Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.

–DOROTHEA LANGE, AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHER

Seventeen

What happened that day?” Camille stepped back from the long table scattered with documents, laptops, and an old-school microfiche reader. She, Finn, and Roz were at the university in Aix-en-Provence going through some barely readable printouts on microfiche, containing news reports about the liberation of the town of Bellerive.

“Depends on who you ask,” Finn said, referring to a narrative accompanied by a photo of an American soldier washing the face of a distraught little boy. “Everybody has a story.”

“It would help if we knew what we were looking for,” Roz muttered.

Camille refilled their glasses of citron pressé. The iced fresh lemon was their only defense against the heat of the day. The archives were housed in a cavernous eighteenth-century building filled with meticulously cataloged files. Many had been rendered in microfiche, and a good number of those were now in digital form. But there was so much raw data, still uncategorized.

“This is Bellerive,” Finn said a few minutes later, showing them a creased photograph. The picture showed a bridge reduced to rubble next to a river. There were no markings anywhere on the photo.

Camille felt a chill despite the heat. “It looks like so many of the others,” she said. “Every town in the district has a stone bridge.”

“This is part of a sign. And here, a piece of a garden fountain.” He turned the photo and indicated a fragment of twisted metal with some print on it, and a broken piece of concrete in the shape of a fish. Then he showed her a picture of a riverside café, dated a few years before the arrival of the Allies. In that shot, the bridge was intact. There were café tables arranged around the fountain under a grape arbor.

“The Café de la Rive,” she said, and the chill intensified. “It just feels so personal. Do you think this photo is from the day of the invasion?”

“Likely,” he said. “Hey, do you want to take a break?”

She looked up at him, startled that he could read her mood. Startled that he cared. She wasn’t used to this. She wasn’t used to anything about this—the feelings he stirred in her, the way she was drawn to him. “What did you have in mind?”

A short time later, they were in his car with the windows rolled down. Fields and fields of sunflowers flanked the highway, the intense yellow creating a glorious contrast with the bluer-than-blue sky. It occurred to Camille to ask where they were going, but she had decided, just this once, to experiment with surrender. For the past five years, she had been so preoccupied with being in control that she’d nearly forgotten what it felt like.