The following day, Shira notices Krystyna with a lady she doesn’t remember seeing before. Arms hooked and heads bent together, they walk a full circle around the barn. Later, Krystyna stands on the loft ladder and whispers to her mother in big, winding words. Her mother nods knowingly but searches Krystyna’s face the way a lost person searches a map. Again, the pail has more food than they’re used to, so Shira eats and eats, happy to stuff herself. A full belly hurts her mother, but not her.

When Henryk comes in, Shira isn’t made to hide. In fact, he has clothes for her tucked inside his jacket: a dress made of yellow gingham, only slightly frayed at the collar, and larger shoes. She trades out the shoes immediately, stretching her crushed pinkie toes. She is to try the dress on tomorrow when she wakes.

At bedtime, her mother doesn’t seem at all tired, so Shira tries to stay awake, but her belly is full and her eyelids heavy, and with the funny thought of her yellow bird hopping across the lines of a new musical composition, chirping out its melody, Shira falls asleep.

Krystyna comes into the barn at dawn. “Is Shira awake?”

“Not yet,” Róża whispers. “Last night’s meal has kept her sleeping soundly.”

“Good. My sister was here yesterday. Everything is set. She will come for her late tonight. We can’t risk waiting.”

Róża cannot speak for the tight lump in her throat.

“This is for you.” Krystyna holds a card with an address printed on it. “When the war is over—when it is safe—you will go and get Shira.”

Róża grasps the card, which reads, “Siostry Felicjanki, ul. Poniatowskiego 33, Celestyn”; yet she holds it away at arm’s distance. She’s not sure she can go through with this.

“Róża, it is her best chance.”

She looks away.

“What is the plan for you?” Krystyna asks.

“My cousin Leyb fled to the woods. I will try to find him.” Since news of the burned-down barn in the adjacent village, Róża has given up on her plan to try with the merchant’s wife. And returning to Gracja isn’t an option, as Henryk just heard the Gracja ghetto has been sealed and subjected to several Aktionen.

“Are you sure the woods—”

“I don’t have anywhere else to go.”

Chapter 21

Róża tugs the shred of blanket, once pink but now a hay-coated dull gray, from Shira’s sleeping grasp and settles herself, needle and thread in hand, in the shaft of light that beams in through the largest crack in the loft wall. There she stitches letter after tiny letter, spelling out Shira’s name in the blanket’s ragged, already bumpy seam.