“Come, sweet,” the lady coaxes. Her voice is gentle, but her grip is tight. She leads Shira off the lane to a footpath, thick with snow. Shira twists to look back, to see the barn, but the lady tugs her forward and along, uphill, then down. Shira can hardly catch her breath. A sharp, cramping pain seizes her side and she feels overcome with nausea. She hasn’t taken more than a few steps in months, and this air is freezing her tongue and tearing at her lungs. She wants to stop. She wants to scream and kick, to make a commotion, but her training in silence stifles her. Snow saturates her shoes, and her toes ache with cold as she is dragged on and on. Tears that well up freeze, icy, on her eyelashes.

“It’s not far now—just down this pathway.”

As she is led farther away from the barn, Shira searches the tree branches for birds, for her bird, but she sees only dark shadows. Her mother’s words—“I need you to go to a safer place”—ring in her head. There is no safe place without her mother! Shira feels her feet slipping beneath her as the lady tugs on and talks her out of the only life she knows:

“You are to call yourself Zosia—a good Catholic name—from now on. Do you understand? You are not to be Shira, not to anyone.”

Shira bites at her salty lips. No, she protests in her head, my name is not Zosia!

Shira knows that she is supposed to hide, but she wants to be Shira still, and she wants to be with her mother! She lifts her blanket to the moonlight, searching for the letters her mother stitched.

“I need you to listen to what I’m telling you. From now on, your parents are named Agnieszka and Bolesław. You have never before set foot in Gracja. That you have hidden in Bielsk, in a farmer’s barn—you must forget every detail of it. Zosia?”

The lady’s eyes are like big blue marbles; worry lives in the lines around her mouth.

Shira feels a stabbing in her heart. She has only ever known her parents as Mama and Tata. Why is this lady calling them strange names? She tries to wrench her hand away—she wants to run back to the barn, she wants to be with her mother—but the lady’s clasp on her is too tight.

The path narrows and the woods thicken. Protruding tree roots batter Shira’s toes and trip up her feet. Shira sputters out words: “Where … are you … taking me? I want … to go back!” All she can see are trees until she spots a lit-up house, a carriage parked beside it, tucked at the bottom of a wooded hill.

“Here now,” the lady says. “Come in the house.”