“Are you sure you want to help the pastor?” he asked.

“Oh, yes,” Marianne said. She had always wished to accomplish something, and, as it turned out, this is what she had been waiting for all along.

She went the first time with a man from the village, Albert, with whom she had gone to school and who now had a wife and five children. They shook hands and he told her to take the lead, even though he was a practiced passeur, to see if she still knew her way through the mountains. It took them close to a week, and then they got a ride back from another passeur from Annecy. Marianne felt exhausted and enthralled. She had remembered everything, and was as good a hiker as anyone. She walked from town thinking of the faces of the children who had been rescued. When she got to the house she was surprised to hear voices inside. She went to the barn for a hatchet, fearing another incident with the Germans, but when she returned her father opened the door to tell her they had a visitor, a young man who was a friend of hers.

“I don’t have any friends.” Marianne kept the hatchet in her hand as she walked inside, but dropped it the moment she saw Victor at the table, where he’d been having lunch with Monsieur Félix. Victor looked completely different, thinner and tougher, with his dark hair shaggy and long enough to bother him so that he kept flinging one hand through it, pushing it back. There were fresh burns on his hands and face that showed clearly he had been in an accident.

“Isn’t he your friend?” her father said, confused.

“Yes of course,” Marianne said, her heart lifting. Victor rose so quickly from his chair that it tipped back and fell with a clatter. He came to embrace her, and in his arms she rose off the floor. She was surprised when he stole a kiss, and even more surprised that the kiss burned. That was how it had begun.

He explained he had been living in the forest with a small group of Jewish resisters, and there had been an accident, a bomb had gone wrong. They’d scattered for a while. Victor had been hurt, his face and hands had been scorched. “You need to heal or you’ll be no use to anyone,” his friend Claude had told him.

Victor had seen a doctor known for helping their people. After that, the one place he could think to go was Beehive House.

“I remembered everything you ever told me about your home,” he told Marianne. “That’s how I found you.”