Gertrude was so focused on the woman, her heel caught on the edge of a step. Her foot slipped, her arms shot out to her sides to regain her balance. A sharp pain pulsed through her ankle. She lifted the skirt of her dress, looked down. Her T-straps cut into the top of her feet, molded themselves in her ballooned flesh. She lowered herself, adjusted the hooks into looser eyelets. Her light brown hair dislodged from behind her ear, fell into her eyes. She shook it out of her face, continued her pursuit of the woman.

She knew the woman was new, new to London University, new to Gertrude’s apartment building, though they hadn’t officially met yet. The woman stuck out in a neighborhood made up of aging Jewish refugees, just as Gertrude did, who was Catholic. But everyone in the neighborhood had lost someone, or several someones, during the war.

Gertrude’s father had died in prison. Or so they thought. No one knew exactly when or how, or why he’d been arrested, though rumor swirled through Linz that Otto, the baker, had turned her father in to the Gestapo for listening to Radio Free Europe. Gertrude had been helping her mother in the kitchen with dinner when the door was kicked in, when her father, who’d been napping on the sofa, was tackled and beaten by three SS officers. They wrapped a blindfold around his eyes, tied a rope around his hands, dragged him outside. She and her mother pled for mercy, chased after him down the stairwell. They didn’t even get to hug him one last time. Pass auf deine mutti, he shouted to Gertrude, as they tossed him into the back of a truck, as clouds of exhaust erected a barrier between them. Look out for your mother.

After, she and her mother stuffed whatever they could into two suitcases and boarded a bus to Steyrling, a tiny town in the Alps, to hide out until the end of the war. Three months later, her mother died giving birth to a premature boy, who Gertrude named Gerald. A week later, Gerald passed away in Gertrude’s arms. In a blink of an eye, her entire family had evaporated from the earth. She was an orphan, in a continent of orphans, who developed a knack for identifying other lost souls like themselves.

After liberation, Gertrude was shipped to the only relative who would (begrudgingly) take her in, Great Aunt Hedwig in London whose actual blood relation to the Enzenebner family was tangential at best. When Aunt Hedwig passed away, at an age twice Gertrude’s mother’s, Gertrude found herself the sole heir to her two-bedroom apartment and a bank account flush with enough money to pay for her living expenses while she completed her education, a degree in history.

The woman paced back and forth along the step, checked her watch, frowned.