Yet Evangeline seemed unsettled. They’d dipped into Le Monocle nightclub, but she’d dragged them right back out again minutes later, claiming the smoke was giving her a headache (as she lit up her own Gauloises). The quays along the Seine were nearly empty; it was only them and the muggy air pressing in until they heard the motor rumbling down the cobblestones. Only the occupiers were allowed to drive now, leaving the rest of them to the Métro and bicycles and walkways. When you saw a car coming toward you, you knew it meant nothing good.

Simone yanked them into a dark alley without thinking, backing Evangeline against the wall. Whatever oddness had settled within Evangeline that night started to fade, and she tilted her face up, eyes sparkling in the starlight, eager as ever for a stolen kiss. Simone kissed her rose lips, her soft cheek, the point where Evangeline’s jaw met her ear. Breathed in her scent of lilac and gin as chiffon shifted and crinkled under Simone’s grip, her callused hand curling around a soft, pale thigh. She kissed Evangeline’s neck and sank against her, constant terror weighing her down.

Three years they’d been like this, passion claimed on rooftops and in alleys and smoky corners of Paris’s lesbian nightclubs. In the catacombs and in the many unused rooms of Evangeline’s palatial home. They’d never been barreling toward something, only seizing up each day as it came, clinging to each other when they could, but all too often, they could not. Not with a father like Evangeline’s and an informer like Simone’s brother. Not with the Nazis flooding the streets.

Evangeline tensed in Simone’s arms.

“What’s the matter?” Simone asked, then tsked as Evangeline started to protest. “What’s really the matter?”

Evangeline smiled sadly and fiddled with her cigarette until Simone took it from her fingers and dragged a long inhale for herself. “You know Violette . . . the race car driver.”

Simone wrinkled her forehead. “Violette Morris?” Violette was something of a celebrity in Le Monocle, tits lopped off, always dressed in a tuxedo with a pretty girl on each arm.

“I heard something at work, something I . . .” Evangeline slumped back against the stone wall. “Never mind. It’s paranoid nonsense.”

Simone folded her arms. She didn’t wear tuxedos like some of the nightclub’s guests, nor dresses; she preferred a breezy tunic and wool trousers with suspenders. In her line of work, carpentry and masonry, it didn’t raise suspicion to dress like that. And in Evangeline’s decorous world of diplomats and sycophants, her ethereal chignon of blond hair and floaty chiffon dresses suited her just fine.

“If you heard it at work,” Simone said, “then it’s not paranoid nonsense.”