“Of course. Of course she must come with us,” he answered, as she’d known he would.

Nina woke Stella carefully, worried that she might take fright at the sight of a strange man standing so close by.

“Do you remember how I told you I’d stopped believing in miracles?”

“Yes,” Stella said, her still-sleepy gaze darting uncertainly between Nina and Nico.

“I think I have to take it back. This is Nico.”

“Your Nico? He came to fetch us? That’s lovely, but I wouldn’t call it a miracle.”

“But it is. I thought he was dead. All this time, I thought he was lost to me, and I never told you because I couldn’t bear to talk of it.”

Stella frowned, still trying to make sense of what Nina was telling her. “Why did you believe he was dead?”

“I thought he had been killed. I was shown the body of a man, still hanging from a gallows, and he was dressed in Nico’s clothes. But I was wrong. Zwerger—he was the Nazi who had me arrested—wanted me to think Nico was dead, likely for no better reason than to torment me. And I believed him.”

“I’m very pleased to meet you, Stella,” Nico now said, though he came no closer. “Thank you for helping Nina.”

“No more than she helped me.”

“All the same, I’m very grateful. I want to welcome you into my family. And I want you to know you will always have a home with us. Always.”

STELLA WENT BACK to sleep not long after, but Nina and Nico stayed awake for the rest of the night; and though it felt daring to do so in a public waiting room, she sat on his lap and let him cocoon her in his arms. Safe in his embrace, she told him her story. Not all of it; not anything close to the entire, bitter, horrifying truth. But enough.

Bolzano and the zeros. The terrible journey to Birkenau. The selection and the women whose names she never learned. The moment her own name was replaced by a number. The chimneys and the aufseherin with her dead-eyed stare. Her horror when she first understood what had become of her parents. Stella. The cold, dark months in the nameless camp near Zschopau. The salve and Georg and the oberaufseherin. Typhus and Terezin and sleeping through the end of the war.

He wept once more when she showed him the number on her arm, and then they were quiet together for a while. She pressed her face against his chest and listened to his heartbeat and told herself that she would never forget this night. She would never forget to be grateful for the blessing of his steadfast heart.

“What happened after they arrested you?” she asked after a long while.