The heron was waiting in what had once been a sapling the first Monsieur Lévi had planted, a cutting from the oldest locust tree in Paris, which had stood on the Rive Gauche for more than four hundred years at an ancient Roman crossroad. It was said that good luck would belong to anyone who ran their hand over the locust’s bark, but Ava could see demons massing in trees all over Paris, in the cherry trees that surrounded Notre-Dame, the sequoia brought from California that stood in the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, the huge ginkgo biloba planted in the Parc Monceau in 1879.

Ava let Lea have the one thing she wanted, such a small request, really, when she would lose everything else. Their time here was over, it was already in the past, and they both knew it.

Lea rushed to take some pebbles from the ground to toss against Julien’s window. He woke and looked out, rumpled with sleep. When he saw her, he knew. Julien pulled on his clothes and took the stairs two at a time. He brought his rucksack with him. He had decided that if they should leave, he would go with them and had already written a note for his parents, wherein he did his best to explain his disappearance. But when he reached the kitchen, there was his mother, waiting for him. Since Victor had vanished she hadn’t once slept through the night. Now she’d heard stones flung up to his window.

“What are you doing?” she asked him. “Do you think you’re going somewhere?”

“Mama,” Julien said. He could see that her hands were shaking. “I must.”

“And do what your brother did? Abandon us?”

He came to sit beside her. She was brokenhearted. He had never seen her cry before, and now tears streamed down her face. “It’s not like that.”

“It’s that girl,” Claire said.

“Not at all.”

She gave a short bitter laugh. “You’re too young for such things anyway. You’re a baby.”

“It’s time to go. You know it’s true.”

“When your father says it’s time, it’s time!” Claire’s expression was set, her eyes bright with hurt. If she lost her children she lost everything. The house and all the time she’d spent on keeping up appearances meant nothing. This was her heart, sitting beside her, the boy who looked anxiously through the window, so ready to leave. “Go on,” she said. “Go! But you tell your father, not me. Wake him up and tell him. Look at his face while you do so. Then you can leave.”