After that she had no more questions. Instead she concentrated on walking, breathing, and swallowing back her tears before they blinded her. She longed to break free and run home, but her father would only insist that she leave again. What else could she do but follow obediently and ignore the protesting drumbeat of her heart?

They turned onto the broad expanse of the Fondamente Nove, where long queues stretched for the ferries to the islands, and approached the ticket booth. The line there was shorter, and in only a few minutes they were standing in front of the ticket agent.

“Good afternoon, sir. Two tickets, please, for me and my wife. Only the one-way.”

“To where, signor?” The agent didn’t even look up from his newspaper.

“Oh, sorry. To Murano. Two one-way tickets to Murano. If you please.”

Nina glanced at Niccolò, surprised by his hesitant manner. Earlier, talking to her father, he’d been at ease, one educated man speaking to another, but now he seemed another man entirely. He’d grown smaller, somehow, as if he had shrunk in upon himself, and his manner was diffident and unthreatening. Even his voice, halting and uncertain, was that of a man who rarely spoke Italian in place of his local dialect.

It was startling to witness, but she wasn’t so silly as to remark upon it in front of the ticket agent. Niccolò collected their tickets and a few coins in change; she followed meekly in his wake, and only once they were on the vaporetto, and their voices were muted by the grumbling of the engine and the shouts of the crew, did she speak again.

“What was that?”

They’d been lucky enough to get two seats inside, hers against the window, but the woman next to Niccolò had enough bags and baskets to set up her own market stall, and he had been forced to sidle so close to Nina that the only place for his near arm was across her shoulders. His mouth now hovered a few centimeters from her ear.

“It was nothing, really,” he admitted. “I was giving him as little as possible to remember. If anyone comes asking questions, he won’t have any memory of me. I’ll have been only one among dozens of anonymous men who bought tickets today.”

“Do you think it likely?”

“That they look for you? Not anytime soon—Dr. Jona saw to that. But they won’t stop, and they will find what they need elsewhere. Likely they’ll begin with the census of Jews they took five years ago. If they don’t have access to those records already, they will before long.”

“My identity card,” she remembered. In the rush to pack, she’d left it and her little change purse behind. “I don’t have—”

“Not to worry. I have papers for you. Breathe, Nina. You’re safe with me.”