Estelle rubbed her face, hating how weak she sounded. “Everyone I have ever cared for in this life is just…gone. The friend I loved as a sister. The man I loved as a father. The man I wish I had a chance to love properly. And now Aviva. And every morning, I open my eyes, and there is this moment when I can convince myself that they are simply somewhere else and that they will find their way home. And then, a second later, I fall off that cliff of hope, and at the bottom, I crash into the certainty that they are never coming back. That they no longer live.”

“Gone is always chained to hope. And hope can be as comforting as it is cruel.” Sophie closed her eyes. “I know you want a different answer, but dead and gone both break my heart every single day. Neither gets any easier.”

Sophie was right. Estelle wanted a different answer.

“But we are still here,” the agent whispered, opening her eyes. “And we have to make it all count for something. It’s all any of us have left.”

Estelle cleared her throat and stood abruptly. Sophie was again right. If she never saw Rachel or Serge or Aviva or Jerome again, she had to make it count for something.

She picked up the envelope and then reached for the rifle. Wordlessly, Sophie handed it to her. Estelle took both and secured them back in the trunk and closed the wardrobe tightly behind her. She returned to find Sophie standing in front of the painting that dominated the space over the fireplace.

“For all its brilliance, I hate that painting,” Estelle said without preamble.

“I hate the entire story,” Sophie replied. “How Polyxena ends up as a sacrifice. It has never made any sort of sense to me.”

“Achilles got what was coming to him yet she became the pawn.”

“I think it’s the idea that she’s simply accepted her fate that I hate the most. Just look at her expression in that painting. She’s accepted that the actions of others have put her in an untenable position. I want to scream at her to fight. To take something back. To balance the scales of justice. To choose her own bloody fate.”

“To make it count.”

“To make it count,” Sophie agreed.

“That painting was my mother’s original décor choice,” Estelle told her. “But I had a different painting hanging there until the war started. The first piece of art I ever bought for myself, in fact. Done by a Norwegian who knows how to paint emotion, not pictures.”

“Why did you take it down?”