His sounds, the sound of them—the battering of a porch door in a rainstorm—could give everything away. Yet Róża can do nothing but wait for it to be over. Henryk feels up her shirt and finds her nipple; he twists, squeezing it hard. Róża locks her eyes on a crack in the loft wall, a shard of moonlight. Henryk continues to push. A final grunt and the hot wet fill of him inside, before he collapses on top of her, one hand still in her hair.

When Róża dares to look Shira’s way, she recognizes at once, from the uneven movement of her girl’s breath, that she is still awake.

Early the next morning, their second day in the barn, Róża is up and frantic about vacating—where will they go?—when Henryk steps in. She straightens, crosses her arms around her middle.

“You can stay a bit longer,” Henryk says.

Róża drops like a puddle into the hay. “Thank you.”

Later, she watches as a neighbor saunters over with a plate of sugar cookies and interrupts Henryk chiding his older boys, Piotr and Jurek. He’d told them to stay away from the well pump, but they’d fiddled with it and it broke. Now he’s warning them—keep out of the barn.

“Did you get a horse?” the neighbor asks, cookies aloft, eyes squinting.

“Huh?”

“A horse in your barn?” Tall piles of hay still block the sight line from the neighboring fields to the front face of the barn.

“Oh that. No, I’ve just been moving equipment around, that’s all.”

When another neighbor approaches, Krystyna—her eyes only once flitting upward toward the loft—carries little Łukasz to the group to be exclaimed over. What instinct to protect Róża and Shira has come to bear in her? Róża wonders. And what instinct to betray might arise as instantly?

Róża pulls away from the wall crack before she witnesses any of them eating the cookies.

The day unfolds: Krystyna brings a jar of water and two pieces of bread; later, Henryk removes their waste pail. Despite these kindnesses, Róża is certain that, at any moment, one or the other will demand they leave—and she racks her brain, trying to think of where she and Shira might go next. There is a house she knows, next village over, where she once delivered a sękacz for a merchant’s wedding. The cake—forty eggs’ worth—was tall like a tree and difficult to carry; and the house stood out because it, too, was very tall. She tries to remember: How near was the house to its neighbors? And did she ever hear news that the merchant’s wife had children? If so, they may have less luck there.…