I take a deep breath, steel myself. “Ella Stepanek?”

She does not answer, but blinks once. The rain, which had gone as quickly as it came, had sent other patrons scurrying indoors. But the woman sits, undeterred. As her chocolate-brown eyes focus on me, they cloud with confusion. “Do I know you?”

“We’ve never met,” I say gently. “But you knew my sister, Sadie. I’m Lucy Gault.” I use my family name, the one that had belonged to the parents and sister I’d never had the chance to know.

The older woman stares at me, as if seeing a ghost. “But how is that possible?” She tries to stand, but her knees wobble and she grips the edge of the table so hard that her tea sloshes over the edge of the cup, staining the tablecloth a darker blue. “That can’t be. We were sure you had died.”

I nod, a lump forming in my throat as it always does when I think of the improbability of my survival. By any measure, I should not have lived. I was born in a sewer, hidden from the Germans, who wanted to eliminate the next Jewish generation and killed them without mercy. I saw then the hundreds of thousands of children who had not lived. I should have been among them.

But somehow, at seventy-two, I am still here.

“How?” the older woman asks again.

I hesitate, searching for the right way to explain. Though I have imagined this moment a hundred times and tried to plan for it, words fail me and I struggle to figure out where to begin. “May I join you?” I ask.

“Please.” She gestures to the chair beside her.

I sit down and turn over the coffee cup on the saucer before me. “It sounds strange to say, but I was born in the sewer. You know that part, don’t you? And that my mother smuggled me out?”

Ella nods. “Your mother was trying to take you to a Catholic hospital that she thought was helping to hide Jewish children.”

“Yes, but on her way there, a priest saw my mother on the street in poor condition and warned her that it was not safe to take the baby to the hospital. He hid the baby and then took my mother to the hospital for care. Only my mother was at the hospital when the Germans came for her. I was saved and later adopted by a Polish couple. My adopted parents, Jerzy and Anna, were wonderful people and I had a good life. They decided to emigrate to America when I was five and I had a happy childhood growing up in Chicago. When I was old enough, they shared what little they knew of my past. I learned the rest from Pawel.”

“The sewer worker?” Ella looks stunned. “But he was arrested for helping the Jews. I assumed he died in prison.”

“He was. But he talked his way out of jail and returned to his family.”