The guards ate well, their meals hearty and plentiful, and some days the smell of the forbidden dishes was almost enough to make her swoon. Fresh bread, meaty stews, and even fruit-laden dumplings emerged from the kitchens and were borne upstairs to the guards’ dining room, and all that ever returned were empty plates, for the scraps were fed to the guards’ dogs.

One of the other kitchen workers, a Polish girl not much older than Stella, was caught reaching for a carrot top that had fallen near the patch of floor she’d been scrubbing. She’d only reached for it, hadn’t even laid a fingertip upon the forbidden scrap of food, but that had been enough. The oberaufseherin had been summoned, and she’d laid the girl’s hands raw with a leather crop, and then she’d watched and smiled as the girl had been forced to mop her own blood from the floor.

It was torture to be surrounded by food, day after day, and be given so little to eat. A cup of tea for breakfast and another at bedtime, then a few hundred grams of stale bread for supper, never quite softened by its accompanying scrape of dismal jam.

Their main meal, taken at midday, was nothing more than soup. Nina saw it being prepared each day, and she knew that it was made of water, vegetable peelings, and a rare handful of slimy turnip greens. Whatever scraps the dogs wouldn’t touch, and would otherwise be thrown out, went into the soup pot, and not so much as a gram of salt was added, not ever, to season it. Often the peelings were thick with dirt, and on those days the soup tasted of mud.

She and the other women were starving, their cheekbones and noses rising into high relief, their bodies reduced to knobbled elbows and protruding shoulder blades and skeletal hands. Centimeter by centimeter, gram by gram, they were being erased. And each day was harder to endure than the one before.

Yet every day, every hour, Nina forced herself to hope. She made herself believe that she would survive. For herself, for Lucia, and for Stella. And since hope was fragile and needed nourishment to grow and bloom, Nina tended its seedlings the only way she could: with memories of Mezzo Ciel, shared in whispers with Stella before they fell asleep each night.

She described Bello and his moods, Selva and her loyalty, the green gardens and golden fields of the farm, the clear, cold waters of the rushing stream, and the dappled shade of the olive tree by the kitchen door. And she told her friend about Nico and his family, and baby Lucia, too, but only the good parts. Only the sunny days.