He holds the bottles up between us. “Where the devil did you get these?”

Expecting the question, though not his intensity, I trip a little through my reply. “A pharmacy, from the owner—well, his wife. I’ve been renting a room from her on an upper floor.”

“Does she know what it’s for?”

“Of course not—not specifically.”

“What do you mean ‘not specifically’?”

I aim to stay calm, even as he triggers my defenses. “She simply knows it’s to help people and that I couldn’t tell her more.”

He huffs and glances away, muttering, “That’s just swell.” Sharply squaring to me, he returns the bottles to the table, not slamming them, but neither is he gentle. “This is all the evidence she needs to turn you in. You realize that?”

“She won’t though,” I insist, reflecting on the encounter, how she volunteered the offerings. “I know it.”

“You don’t know that.” He bends to loom over me, hand planted on the table. “Think of Thea and her family. After almost a year of hiding and caring for them, just like that, the Brouwers tossed them out like meat scraps to a pack of wolves.”

I loathe feeling like an admonished child, and the Brouwer family’s betrayal still seems peculiar. Nonetheless, his point is impossible to counter.

He adds, “At least tell me you haven’t spoken of Evelien—to anyone.”

I open my mouth to fire back that of course I wouldn’t have, but the protest catches in my throat. Because it isn’t true.

“Fen,” he rasps. The fear in his voice reaches his eyes. “Who did you talk to?”

I fight the impulse to shrink into my chair. After all, Arie himself just secured help from a stranger. I answer, mustering confidence, “Willem. He was my contact. One of yours too, he said. He’s actually how I knew where you’d been spotted when—”

“I don’t know any Willem.”

I gape as Arie stands warily upright.

“But he said…you two communicated…”

“When?” he presses.

I’m trying not to panic. I could describe Willem’s looks—except that a tall blond with blue eyes describes half of Holland. “He told me the other day. When I first met him.”

“No, when did he say we communicated?”

My mind scrabbles for purchase. “I don’t know… He didn’t say exactly.” I’m questioning if I’ve been fooled, how many details I gave him, and what he’ll do with that information. “He only said he passed you a note, from a distance. And that just this week, he was trying to find you, to get you in touch with London.”

Arie relaxes a fraction. “It’s Anton,” he says, a conclusion to himself.