“No it isn’t,” Ettie insisted. “It has to be you. I trust you.”

He poured them both a glass of wine, then took the chessboard and placed it on the table between them. “Whoever wins decides.”

He assumed there was no chance of his losing, but she was better than he thought, and, he supposed, he had been a good teacher. Ettie was a smart girl, smart enough to win.

They went upstairs, not to his room—he could not have taken her to the bed he had shared with his wife—but to a guest chamber where friends from Paris had often stayed in the time when people could travel freely. Many of their past visitors were already dead. No friends had visited for many years. Now the only guests he had stayed in the barn.

Ettie removed her dress and undergarments and folded them onto a chair, then slipped into bed. The doctor hesitated, watching her with concern. He noticed the scar on her arm in the shape of a letter.

“It’s in memory of my sister,” Ettie said when she caught him staring.

Girard thought this might be madness, for the two of them to be in this bedroom together; surely it was unethical. But when she motioned to him to join her, she looked fragile, and he didn’t know which would wound her more, responding to her suggestion or turning away. He took off his jacket and folded it onto a chair, then undressed and sat on the edge of the bed. He ran his hand over her hair.

“Don’t treat me as if I were your patient,” Ettie scolded, taking offense. She leaned up to kiss him, and he kissed her in return. “That’s better,” she said.

He folded himself into bed with her, and they both forgot who they were and what had brought them together. But Ettie didn’t forget that he was a kind, decent man, and he didn’t forget she was a girl of twenty who might not live to be twenty-one. Because of this what transpired between them was something they hadn’t expected, it was almost as if they had fallen in love in a world where anything could happen and nothing was impossible.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

BEEHIVE HOUSE

HAUTE-LOIRE, JULY 1944