At bedtime, Zosia cannot find her shred of blanket. She looks beneath her mattress, in her dresser, even in the secret drawer Sister Alicja recently allotted her for saving bits of food for her mother. How can it have disappeared like this? She looks again under her pillow and between the sheets at the foot of the bed, beginning to feel panicked. Did Adela or Ula dare to take it? They haven’t caused her trouble since before moving convents, since she caught them raiding the larder. Eventually Zosia notices that her sheets are freshly laundered. Maybe her blanket got taken up with the afternoon wash?

She rushes through the corridors where the statues and dark portraits are still strange to her. She stops just short of the washing room, humid and slick and soapy, when she spots Sister Olga and Mother Agnieszka.

Neither would approve of her late night errand, so she conceals herself behind the open washroom door and strains to listen as Mother Agnieszka tasks Sister Olga with various arrangements for next Sunday’s service. A guest organist will be coming for the feast day, she is saying. Zosia’s mind runs to the propers of the liturgy until a sharpness in Mother Agnieszka’s tone brings Zosia back to her errand and to fragments of their conversation.

“What are you holding in your hands? Sister Olga, is that Zosia’s blanket?”

“Yes, and I want to show … omething odd at the seam. These stitches—”

“Never you mind about a little girl’s … I’m here to talk with you about … for Sunday.”

“But—”

Zosia’s fingers float to the kerchief knot at the nape of her neck and she remembers: her mother sewed in the same rhythm she braided: long threaded strokes punctuated by a gentle tug.

“Sister Olga, I understand … don’t like to launder the children’s personal … If a child’s security blanket got caught up with the sheets … mistake. I’ll take it now.”

“But what if … a code?” Zosia hears something unexpected in Sister Olga’s voice: a tinge of fear. “Do you think … haps show the commandant?”

“Absolutely not! Now I insist … back to folding laundry. The light down here is … and your imagination … wild tonight.”

At Zosia’s communion ceremony, Sister Olga had muttered something about shoddy baptism records. Zosia had stopped midstride—what baptism records?—but Mother Agnieszka nodded her forward and she’d marched up the aisle in her pretty white dress.