Róża blinks between Miri and Chana, sisters taking her into their fold. “Thank you,” she says. She shoves the pill into her pant pocket near the sewn-in card with the convent address—her only fragment of waking hope that Shira can be found safe; that she is growing, eating, playing, still with music in her head.

Chapter 26

In the convent, food rations shrink. Mealtimes grow somber as the soup thins and the bread packs dust. By nightfall, Zosia is weak with hunger, but her bird won’t settle; he hops past the cup of her hands, unable to find a comfortable nest. His wondrous eighteen-note call has changed. It is now a frantic wavering beween two notes, a tremolo, as if to erase all distance, bring her mother near to her, barely a pitch away.

Zosia’s sleep comes troubled. She slips into dreams that rouse her, panicked.

Her bird is no longer yellow. His feathers are white, though the downy lower barbs are brown, and the children point and laugh. Or else he is all white and Zosia can’t spot him in this place of white plaster, white curtains, starched bedsheets, and snow. When he settles to sleep beside her, she rolls onto him and squishes him—she can’t protect him even from herself!

Zosia wakes with a start to find Kasia’s doll on her pillow, set next to her shred of blanket. She blinks back grateful tears. In the quiet of the room—even quieter than the barn without the sound of rustling hay or rabbits or falling snow or her mother—she listens to the other girls, breathing softly in sleep. The difference between them and her, so palpable, is beyond her understanding. It is more than how they know the rituals and regimens of the convent and recite every hymn by heart; how they swarm together so easily; how she stands apart with just the little violin. More than that she has secrets buried inside, secrets she is under orders to forget and is forgetting, though she wishes desperately to remember.

Zosia is given a new secret when Mother Agnieszka leads her to a hiding place—a closet in the hallway of the chapel, filled with fancy white prayer robes that are quilted and stitched with shiny gold threads. At the back is a wooden partition, a false back, behind which is a smaller, interior space. Zosia peers in to see that the walls are made of rough scrap boards and the corners are studded with nails, half hammered in, half bent.

“You are to slip behind this wall and remain hidden when soldiers come. Do you understand? You are not to climb out until Sister Alicja, Sister Nadzieja, or I tell you to.”