Lia dropped the postcard as though it had bitten her and stumbled to her feet, knocking the little chair to the side. Despair warred with revulsion, leaving her nauseated. She was such a fool. Only a fool would have clung to hope. Only a delusional fool would have refused to truly accept the evidence scattered all over this apartment. As far as irrefutable proof went, Lia couldn’t imagine anything more damning.

She still had no idea why her grandmother had chosen to leave her this apartment but the reason that she had kept its existence a secret was abundantly clear. Because her grandmother, a woman who had hung the French flag out every May in celebration, a woman who had repeatedly declared her love for her country, hadn’t been a patriotic citizen at all. Her grandmother had been a liar and a traitor and a fraud.

Her grandmother had been a Nazi collaborator.

Chapter 2

Chapter
2

Sophie

Wieluń, Poland
31 August 1939

Sophie Seymour had been eight years old when she’d first heard someone refer to her as unnatural.

It had been at Heloise Postlewaithe’s birthday party, an event that Sophie had attended only because Mrs. Postlewaithe had invited the entirety of her daughter’s summer Sunday school class. The party had been an affair marked by fancy frocks with copious ruffles, rich cakes and tepid tea, and games that had bored Sophie to death, quite frankly. She’d wandered away from the shrill fracas of musical chairs and pass the parcel without anyone noticing and made her way to the Postlewaithes’ library that was up on the first floor.

The Postlewaithes’ country manor was impressive, their library equally so. Here, amid the blessed silence and the soft afternoon light, Sophie had found a Latin primer, no doubt a leftover from a previous Postlewaithe’s Eton days. At eight, Sophie was already fluent in French, Spanish, and Italian, though she’d never seen the root language from which all of those had been derived. She’d been instantly captivated and settled down in a warm corner of the room to read.

As absorbed in her newfound study and tucked away upstairs as she was, she hadn’t heard the discovery of her absence. She hadn’t been aware of the uproar and panic when it was finally discerned that an eight-year-old girl was missing or hearkened to the fears that, as the initial search had turned up nothing, she might have fallen into one of the manor’s ponds and drowned.

It wasn’t until a frantic Mrs. Postlewaithe had finally discovered Sophie in the library an hour later that Sophie had any indication that anything was wrong. She’d yanked Sophie to her feet, relief dissolving into fury, and snatched the primer out of Sophie’s hands.

“What is wrong with you?” she’d demanded, her face flushed an alarming shade beneath a stylish coiffure that was still perfectly in place.

“Nothing,” Sophie replied, blinking with incomprehension.