She blinked. It was a question stupid enough that it should have made her itchy. But he’d smiled at her Antarctica quip, so she’d keep playing along. “No, my parents forgot to give me one. It’s a great tragedy. I’ve been answering to ‘you, girl’ all my life.” She extended her hand too, but not with a limp wrist, as women usually did. She held it out to shake.

He breathed a laugh and shook her hand. “All right, You Girl. I’ll simply astound you with my powers of deduction.” He made a show of concentration—pursed lips, narrowed eyes, and fingers pressed to his temples. “Given that lovely hint of an accent, I would guess Wallonia or Brussels.”

Apparently Drake Elton wasn’t a complete idiot. A corner of her mouth pulled up. “And, actually. Not or.”

“Two homes, or did you move?”

She tilted her head to the side. A clever question. The answer would tell him quite a bit about her family’s station. “Two.”

Elton leaned against the wall, exaggerated concentration fading into an easy smile. “Which one did you prefer?”

Not the question she would have expected, exactly. But an easy one to answer. “The one in Louvain.”

Being not-an-idiot, he would be familiar with the name Louvain—the place that had become synonymous with the German army’s brutality. The place that was now more pile of rubble than actual town.

But his face didn’t settle into lines of horror. Acknowledgment flickered through his eyes, and his smile lost a single degree of its ease, but he held it in place. “What do you miss most about it?”

She drew up straighter. Occasionally people asked her about her former home—what it had been like, how they escaped the destruction, whether the German occupation had been as cruel as the papers reported. But no one had ever asked her that, and she didn’t have a ready answer—a strange state, for her.

Memories crowded, shouting to be recalled above the others.

The pastries from the bakery down the street. The library at Papa’s university. The old schoolroom where tutor after tutor had fled in exasperation when she’d insisted—and proven—that she knew just as much already as they did. The mountain of books and newspapers and articles they’d lost in the fire when the soldiers invaded.

Strange. Just a few minutes ago, she was thinking of how she didn’t want to go back. Now, in her mind, she had done just that. And her lips curved up. “The tree in our back garden. There was a bench under it—the best place in the world to read.”

His smile brightened again, went warm, invited her to say more.