IMAKEPESTO: No. We can look into that when we go back to Bellerive.

We. Did he mean him and the supermodel?

She set the print of Lisette next to the screen and studied the images side by side. Her grandparents gazed back at her across the decades—two strangers to whom she was inextricably tied. Lisette was a beauty, clearly much younger than Didier, her sleek hair and delicate features almost mesmerizing. Didier, not so much. Even in a portrait meant to flatter, he had close-set, pale blue eyes and wispy blond hair, and—

Camille caught her breath. She stared some more, looking back and forth at the photos. Lisette and Didier. She couldn’t be certain from the Lisette photo, since it was in black and white, but the tones of the picture suggested that her father’s mother had light blond hair and pale eyes. Lisette and Didier Palomar were both as blond as Vikings.

Then Camille grabbed a picture of her father—a shot taken soon after his arrival in America. In the photo, he was just eighteen or nineteen, close to Lisette’s age. Camille compared their features. Like his mother, he had full lips, prominent cheekbones, wide-set eyes, and a strong chin. Unlike her, he had curly black hair, deep brown eyes, and olive-toned skin.

Between Didier and Henry, she could see no resemblance at all.

More unsettling was the fact that Henry’s coloring—and hers, and Julie’s, for that matter—was wildly different from his parents’.

The question nagged at her. How could these two Aryan-featured people have had a son with Henry’s coloring? Was there some other branch of the family tree?

She set down her glass of wine and picked up the old camera, feeling its heft in her hands. Then she looked at Lisette. “Who were you?” Camille asked in French. “What were you thinking in that moment? Why do you look so sad?”

Camille tried to imagine the stories going through Lisette’s head as she pressed the shutter, capturing a haunted moment. Camille had spent a long time studying every detail of the photograph. Based on the state of Lisette’s pregnancy, the pictures on the film roll might have been the last photos she ever took.

IMAKEPESTO: Hello? Did I lose you?

Transfixed by the photos, Camille didn’t reply to the message. She lifted the old camera to her eye and peered into the viewfinder, wondering what had gone through Lisette’s mind when she took a photo. Still speaking French, she said, “I wish I’d known you. What could you have told me? What secrets are you hiding?”

Part 2

The Var

What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.

—JOHN BERGER, ENGLISH ART CRITIC

Nine

Bellerive, the Var, France

1941

Lisette Galli held Dr. Toselli’s wonderful camera in her hands. “You’re giving this to me? Surely you cannot part with it.”

The elderly Dr. Cyprian Toselli, her employer, held up his hand. “Consider it a special gift for your sixteenth birthday.”