One of the first things she’d learned, once her father had begun taking her on his visits to patients, was to get out of bed straightaway. No lingering beneath the warm covers—that made it a hundred times harder to rise, especially in the winter. She was dressed and at the door before five minutes had passed.

Her father held out his stethoscope and thermometer; these she buried in the deepest pockets of her coat. The rest of his supplies went in the bottom of her knitting bag. “Who came for you?”

“Her neighbor’s son. Poor child was frozen through.”

Before 1938, they’d had a telephone. It had sat on a table on the landing, with a pencil and pad of paper next to it. When she’d turned ten, her father had declared her old enough to use the telephone, and after she’d practiced taking down messages and answering properly and promptly, it had become her special job to answer. But the telephone had been taken out years ago, after her father had been barred from practicing medicine, and now the table held only an empty vase.

It was raining, but only enough to dampen the air and make the paving stones slippery beneath her feet. The moon was bright above the clouds, and there was no shortage of light peeking through the shuttered windows of the houses they passed, for no one bothered to obey the blackout. Of all the horrors that war had brought to Venice, bombs from the sky were the least of them.

They kept to the narrower calli, pausing at every turn to ensure the path was clear, and if they did come across a patrolling policeman, she knew—at least she hoped she remembered—what to do. They had been visiting family, her father would say, and she would nod, and Papà would explain they had been waiting for the rain to subside, for it always seemed to be raining that winter. And they would hold their breath and pray the man who had stopped them was in a mood to be generous.

They never spoke of what might happen if the authorities found out her father was still practicing medicine.

Signora Mele’s home was in the Gheto Vecchio, at the end of a dead-end passage off the Calle del Forno. Five stories high, it was one of the oldest buildings in the gheto, and over the centuries it had settled awkwardly on its sandy foundations. Even the famed tower in Pisa did not have such uneven floors.