Sitting at my desk, I open my laptop. Wikipedia’s site pops up first. I click on it, read about the tens of thousands of people the Nazis tortured as slave laborers to mine the granite quarries and to build 102 prisoner sub-camps. From the summer of 1940 until the Red Army liberated them on February 14, 1945, some 125,000 people passed through Gross-Rosen and the other camps—40,000 were murdered. I go to the official Gross-Rosen Concentration Camp Museum website. It’s located in Rogoźnica, Poland. On the left side, there are tabs. One of them is labeled “Database of the Dead.” I’ve seen enough. I need to know what this is about.

“Okay?” My voice is barely a whisper.

“Nana was there.”

“What?”

“And that story I told you about my grandpa saving a Jewish boy?”

I nod. “Uh-huh?”

“My grandpa didn’t save the Jewish boy. He was the Jewish boy.”

“Oh my God!” My hands fly up to my mouth.

Cade struggles not to cry again.

“Oh, Cade.” I get to my feet, but he stops me by holding up his hand. I sit back down at my desk and wait.

Several minutes pass before Cade is able to speak again. Then he tells me the rest of his grandpa’s story, the parts he didn’t know until Nana told him. “Every single member of my grandparents’ families was murdered,” he says. “They’re Jewish.” He rakes his fingers through his hair, then scrubs his face. “We’re—” He cuts himself off. “I don’t know what we are.”

He stares down at his palms, flexes his fingers. “I don’t know who I am.”

My heart breaks for him and it takes all my willpower not to cry. He doesn’t need my tears. “You’re Cade. This doesn’t have to change anything. You always knew there was something about your grandparents’ past, right? Now you know.”

His eyes darken, fill with misery. “There is so much I don’t know! And it could have been me! Me, Logan.” He slaps his palm against his chest. “They would have killed me. Those evil, filthy excuses for human beings killed my family! Murdered for what? Do I look any different than I did yesterday or the day before or a month before?”

“Not at all.”

He covers his eyes with his arm. “I’m Jewish, Logan. What makes me Jewish?”

I get up, sit at the bottom of the bed. “There’s a rabbi at SUNY-Lakeside my dad knows. We could get in touch with him?”

He pushes himself up onto his elbows. “I don’t want to talk to a rabbi. I—I can’t. Maybe someday.” He scoots off my bed, checks his phone. “I gotta go. My parents and Nana were sleeping when I left. But if they wake up—I took the car and didn’t leave a note.”

“Call me when you get home.”

“Sure.”