“Me too, Różyczka.”

At sunset a loaf of challah materializes, as does a pair of candles in tarnished candlesticks. Little girls walk past with baskets of bite-size bread slices piled aloft. As she speaks out the prayers Róża aches for her family, to have them standing by her side. They are in a better place. They aren’t suffering. The anguish will get easier. She utters the ancient holy words and she tells herself these things, trying to believe them.

Mission preparations ramp up, with seven men and women readying to leave. Aron is among them. People check munitions, pack food into sacks, fill canteens with water. Róża and Shmuel inspect the restitched bandoliers one last time before handing them out.

“How long will they go for?” Róża asks.

“However long it takes.”

When Aron enters the shop, he slings two of the belts crosswise over his shoulders. A little boy named Paweł, dark curls down his back, trails him, asking, please, if he can come on the mission. Aron kneels down and places a gentle hand on his shoulder. “Not this time, Pawełek, but soon.” He returns to standing, glances over at Shmuel, then at Róża.

“I will see you soon as I can, Różyczka,” he says, and lopes out of the shop.

By the time Róża steps into the main square, Aron is nowhere in sight.

For the next two days, Róża listens as Chana bemoans her assignment—to stay and cook, per Sonia’s orders, despite Chana’s pleas to join the mission.

“I don’t understand it. I would fight courageously.”

“Yes, you would.” Róża doesn’t mention Chana’s utter lack of training with a gun.

“I’m more fit than both Fregel sisters put together.”

“But who would make soup for us, Chana? Would you leave us to subsist on their concoctions?” Secretly, or not so secretly, Róża is grateful that Chana wasn’t permitted to go. She is grateful, too, for the protected sleeping bunk and the ready food here. She joins a small table of women at lunch.

After the others disperse, a young mother asks Róża to hold her baby, Issi, while she takes a bowl of soup. Róża protests, but already he is placed in her arms. As he wriggles against her, she feels a contracting in her uterus, a tingling in her breasts. She is transported back to new motherhood, to holding the warm bundle of her own baby close, the mingling of calm and utter joy. A lullaby comes to her lips, the beginning of a hen’s cucoo. No.

This baby’s heft, his doughy smell, his cry packed with gaping need—it is all too much for Róża. She thrusts him back into his mother’s arms.

“I’m sorry, I can’t help you.”

“But, please—”

“I said I can’t.”