“No. It’s too great a risk. I know you’ve heard the stories. People pay for safe passage and then are delivered into the hands of the fascists.”

“You have friends everywhere,” she pleaded. “You can ask them to help us.”

“Only to put their lives at risk. And that is something I cannot ask of anyone.”

Her father had been staring at something over her shoulder, his gaze unfocused, and she didn’t have to turn to know what was drawing his attention. It was a photograph of the three of them, taken on her eighteenth birthday, not long before Mamma had fallen ill. It had been the spring of 1938, before the racial laws had stripped away nearly everything that mattered. Only a few scant years, but it might as well have been a century.

“Papà?”

“Yes?” he answered, his eyes upon her again, and for a heartbeat she saw it—the absence of hope. It was there, and then he blinked it away, and even tried to smile, but she had seen it and he knew.

She ought not to have questioned him like that, needling away, ignoring how tired he was, for of course he had considered everything. Of course he had lain awake, night after night, slowly smothering under the crushing weight of their plight.

“I’m sorry. You’re right—of course you are. We’ll be safe here. We only need to keep on as we’ve done. I was wrong to panic just now.” Useless, weak, impotent words, but what else did she have to give?

She crouched next to his chair and set her head upon his knees. And she waited, her breath catching in her throat, for the moment when he would smooth her hair from her brow, his hand so cool and comforting, and tell her that all would be well.

She waited, and after a while he did brush his fingers across her temple, and he bent his head close to hers, and she thought he might say something. She waited, but he had no words of comfort, and so she got to her feet, moved the now-cool hot-water bottle out of the way, and helped him stand on his poor, aching feet.

“Good night, Papà.”

“Good night, my darling girl. I—”

“What is it?”

“Nothing. Only that I hope you sleep well.”

Chapter 3

21 September 1943

Are you all done?” Antonina asked, waiting—hoping—for a spark of acknowledgment in her mother’s eyes.

It was nearly seven o’clock, and she’d spent the last hour helping her mother eat her supper, one scant spoonful after another, just as she did every day. Every morning and midday, too, for the attendants at the casa were hard-pressed to spare the time for the task, and she never found it a chore to spend time with her mother.