At dusk Ettie often went outside. She wore a heavy coat and her shoes were stuffed with paper to keep her feet from freezing. She had dug a small path to a stream, and once there had broken through the ice. Ettie crouched down and concentrated, then dipped her hand in the water, ignoring the cold. She caught a fish that was asleep in the frigid water. She carried him up the path into the house and placed him in front of Bettina. Bettina stood up, stunned by the fish flopping about on the table, then she laughed and couldn’t stop.

“This is a miracle,” she declared.

Bettina cooked the fish for dinner, and after they’d eaten the two women felt they had been saved. Every day Ettie went fishing in the mornings, and most days she caught something. She was a better fisherman than she was a forger. The fish swam directly into her hands. She was coming back from the stream one afternoon when an unfamiliar car pulled up the road. Ettie stopped behind a tree, in a panic, until she recognized Arno. She ran through the snow to meet him. She was about to ask if he had thought to bring food with him, until she saw the look on his face. She knew that something had gone wrong. He grabbed his rucksack and they went up to the house. The snow was turning blue. Soon it would begin to melt. Arno had indeed brought food, and he unpacked some bread and cheese and sausage. Bettina was there, her hands covered with ink, and when she saw him she burst into tears. There was no easy way to say what had happened, an explosion gone wrong, the bomb in Jean’s hands. Claude was fine, but Victor had been badly burned and after a doctor had seen to his wounds, he’d insisted on being taken to a farm near a village about an hour away.

“They’ll come back,” Arno said.

“Of course,” Bettina agreed.

Ettie made dinner that night, she was as good a cook as any of them. Afterward she went outside as she always did. Arno came out as well.

“We’ll have to move back into the woods soon,” he said.

He’d been nearby when the bomb had gone off and had seen what it had done to his friend. He now had ringing in his ears, but more than that, he seemed changed. He had a gun that he played with, as if he could never be ready enough for an attack. He’d brought in some rifles from the trunk of the car.

“All of those people on the convoy we couldn’t stop will die because we made a mistake,” he said. “I made the mistake. It was my plan.”

“We all make mistakes,” Ettie told him. It was better to make a mistake than to do nothing. “I think you should teach me some things.”