He tore his eyes from the rail pass to see that Lia had spread out a half-dozen photos, all of the same woman. Only in these photos, Sophie Beaufort was laughing, smiling, or looking at the camera over her shoulder with a sultry expression. Each of the photos was a headshot, her hair expertly styled, cosmetics applied to her lips, eyes, and cheeks with the sort of professional precision that put Gabriel in mind of glossy fashion adverts.

He reached for the closest one, holding it up to the light.

“That’s impossible,” he muttered.

“What is?”

“The woman in this photo. I know her.”

Lia laughed with a snort of disbelief. “I think you’re about seventy years too late to know her.”

“This is my great-aunt. Sophie Seymour. I’m sure of it.”

“And she was from Marseille?” Lia asked skeptically.

“No.”

“Well, this woman was. And her name isn’t Sophie Seymour.”

“There’s a photo—a portrait of her—that hangs on the walls at Millbrook,” Gabriel said. “I’ve seen it a thousand times. And my grandfather has a photo of the two of them together on his bedside table. They were always very close until she—” He stopped.

“Until?” Lia prompted.

“Um.” Gabriel ran a hand through his hair self-consciously. “Never mind. Forget I said anything.”

“Come on,” Lia said. “You can’t leave me hanging. What happened to her?”

Gabriel winced. “She was working for the Foreign Office as a translator in Warsaw. She disappeared—died—when the Germans bombed the city in 1939.”

“Which one was it? Disappeared? Or died?” To her credit, Lia wasn’t laughing at him.

“The records say she fled her post before Warsaw was bombed. But she vanished without a trace in the carnage that followed. Hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed in that initial invasion. She was one of them.”

“Well,” Lia said dryly, her lips twitching, “she looks pretty good for a dead person given that the pass is dated 1943.”

“Do you think we might just pretend I didn’t say anything so that I can preserve whatever shreds of dignity I have left?”

“They say everyone in the world has a doppelgänger,” Lia offered. “We just happened to have found hers.”

“Now who’s being kind?” Gabriel muttered.

“I think I owe you a little kindness,” she replied with a grin. She picked up one of the glossy headshots. “Whoever she was, she looks bold and daring. Like the way my grandmère looks in the photos out in the apartment. I wonder if they were friends.”

“Hard to say. It’s possible.”