There were no mirrors in the convent, but Lea could see her reflection in the shine of the silverware the girls were made to polish, and she didn’t recognize the person looking back at her. Her hair had grown and was shoulder-length. Her features were so like her mother’s, she had to look away or she might burst into tears. She had begun her monthly bleeding. “Jetzt bist du in Schwierigkeiten,” Renée told her. Now you’re in trouble. “Niemand möchte eine Frau sein.” No one wants to be a woman.

Although Lea hadn’t told Ava about her situation, Ava seemed to know. She left clean rags and new undergarments, and when Lea found them she sobbed. Her mother should be the one to instruct her. She would have told her that Renée was wrong, becoming a woman should not be considered a terrible fate, even though it meant you bled. It was life that you carried inside you, your own and the life of the future. If you survive, I survive inside of you.

By now Lea had looked beneath her roommate’s bed. Renée hoarded food there, bread that was growing moldy, bits of cheese, fruit taken from the lunch table. Lea liked the quiet kitchen, with its stone floors and large windows, and helped Ava in the dark hours of morning before prayers and breakfast. She often filched a baguette, then ran upstairs and hid it beneath Renée’s bed. Renée never thanked her, but her dark eyes would settle on Lea, as if she wished to tell her something. All the same, Lea was friendless and lost and she missed Julien. Ava tried to cheer her with treats. Some new apples, a bar of chocolate she’d found in a cabinet, but Lea couldn’t even bring herself to smile. While the loaves were baking, she wrote notes that she kept in the back of her prayer book. Perhaps one day she would be able to send them to Julien.

“You’re still thinking about him,” Ava said.

“I’m not,” Lea insisted. But she was and they both knew it.

There was no news from Paris, but she worried about Julien’s fate. But there was nothing to do about it, or at least it seemed so until Ava sent Lea to pick up a basket of eggs from a neighbor. There she noticed a pigeon house near the chicken coops.