“Oh, sweetie, I’m not trying to make you sad. I just want to make sure you know you’ve been my whole world. It’s not the world I imagined for us when your dad was still here. But we had a wonderful life and we still do; it’s all because of you.”

“Mom, that’s nice. It’s totally sweet. But . . . Okay, here’s the thing.” Julie turned to face her, drawing her knees up to her chest. “As much as you worry about me, I worry about you. In a few years, I’ll be on my own.”

The words turned Camille’s blood cold. “Of course you will. It’s not my favorite thing to think about, but that’s the way it works, right?”

“I mean really on my own. You’ll always be my home base, but I want to go far away, see the world, go back to Bellerive and visit Paris and Sydney and all the places I haven’t seen yet in the world.”

Great, thought Camille. That’s what she got for taking Julie to France, giving her a taste of travel. She should never have—

She stopped herself from thinking like that. “I don’t blame you, Jules. Everybody needs to see the world. I did the same thing at your age.” She pulled Julie into a hug, inhaling her candy-sweet scent. “There are certain journeys you make in your lifetime that stick with you always. You remember the feel of the air on your skin, the quality of the light, the food you ate, the smells that wafted in the air. Most of all, you remember how you felt about the person you were with. And how you felt about yourself.”

“That was this summer, for me,” Julie murmured against her sleeve. “I’m glad you get it, Mom. You totally get it.”

Camille drove a rental car from the Burlington airport to the town of Switchback, Vermont. In the passenger seat, her father gazed out the window, while in the back, Julie listened to French pop songs on her phone, occasionally coming out with a tuneless sing-along phrase that made Camille smile.

It was the final—and most important—trip they would make all summer. For Papa, it was the most important trip of his life. She glanced over at him. His jaw tightened and released, tightened and released. “How are you doing?” she asked softly.

“As you’d expect—excited. Nervous. Filled with an emotion I can’t describe.”

She reached over and patted his arm, then turned back to her daughter. “That makes three of us, eh, Jules?”

“Totally.” Julie plucked out her earbuds. “Look, the sign says four more miles.”

Camille flexed her hands on the steering wheel. Her search for each WWII veteran on Finn’s list had led to this moment. The high school math teacher from Philadelphia was not a match. He’d passed away, but his daughter assured Camille he could not have fathered a child in France in 1944. Yes, he’d taken part in Operation Dragoon, and yes, he’d been in the Var, but not until August of that year, weeks past the date of conception. The second man—a retired farmer in North Carolina—was still living, and although he recalled the summer of ’44 in detail and had done reconnaissance work in May of that year, he was never near Bellerive.