Julien turned and waved at Lea, a grin on his face. Lea waved back. Inside of him was the boy she had known, but she was the only one who could see him.

“What will happen to him?” she asked Ava. She had worried about him for so long it was difficult to stop. No person should know what fortune would bring, but the nuns at the convent had gossiped, insisting that Ava could read the future, and all Lea wanted to know was whether Julien would continue to keep his promise to her.

Lea and Ava both gazed at the young man ahead of them, the one who had given them plums on their first day in Paris, who had listened outside Lea’s door when she wept for her mother and grandmother, who had lost every member of his family.

“He’ll be the man you trust.”

That was all Ava would say, no matter how Lea begged for more, but in the end, it was enough.

They planned to cross near midnight, when it was most difficult to see shapes moving through the woods, when invisibility was a virtue and a gift. Once they went across they would be arrested, then officially questioned by the Swiss guards before being turned over to the Red Cross. There was only one answer to any of the guards’ questions: I fled because I feared for my life.

Lea wore the blue dress her mother had sewn. She felt naked without the locket she had lost before she reached the doctor’s house. She had nothing to take across with her except for Ahron Weitz’s painting of the sky. She had shown it to Julien. By then, he had realized he would not be a painter; he was a mathematician and had always been so. At night, when he regarded the stars, he often felt his father beside him. He viewed the world in shapes, for indeed, the universe was made up of pieces of a puzzle. He remembered his lessons in the library. His father had said there was a logic to the natural world and to life itself, it was simply that the plan hadn’t yet been understood.

He and Lea had decided they would go to New York, where anything was possible. They wanted a new world, one where the future could be made by anyone who wished to do so, a country made by immigrants.

“What if they separate us?” Lea asked.

“That won’t happen. We go together.”