Out of her mother’s sight, Lea took the scissors, then went along the hall to the linen closet. She sat on the floor in the dark as if she were hovering between worlds, her heart still aching. If she had died she would have been with her father, but instead she was here. It had felt so good to bite the demon. She wished she had torn him in two. She heard her mother call her name, but she didn’t answer. By now Lea was certain that everything that had happened was her fault. Her long blond hair had made him notice her. She held her hair in one hand and with the bloody scissors, she began to cut. She should have been invisible, she should have never been there, she should have called out to her mother, she should have murdered him herself, she should have recognized him as a demon.

Her mother was outside the closet.

“My darling girl,” she called, but Lea didn’t answer. By now her hair was uneven, as short as a boy’s. When Hanni opened the door to see what her daughter had done, she gasped. The floor was layered with strands of hair, brilliant in the dark.

Hanni came to sit beside her daughter.

“This is their doing, not ours,” she told Lea.

His eyes had been blue, then blood had filled them, then he was gone. Now he was among the demons who sat in the trees, waiting to scoop up the innocent and carry them away.

“He liked my hair.”

“That was not the reason it happened. It was because of who he was, not who you are.”

Lea didn’t answer, but she knew the truth. Who I used to be.

Hanni held her daughter’s hand, grateful that God had allowed her to enter the alley with the shears in her hand. But what would have happened if he hadn’t been so kind, and what would happen next time? Every day there were arrests, and by the following autumn men and women and children would be taken to the remote Grunewald freight station, where they would board the trains that would bring them to killing camps in the East.