Lotti left Ben and cycled toward the town center. When she reached the main square, she dismounted and wheeled her bicycle to the café.

The late-afternoon sun was still warm, and the terrace outside was beginning to fill up. Lotti loitered, suddenly shy, still holding her bicycle.

“What do you want?” an elderly waiter came out of the café and barked at her.

“I’m just looking,” she stammered.

He gazed at her suspiciously. In the glass of the café window, Lotti caught sight of her reflection and understood. The old shorts and jersey pulled from the Barton jumble pile, already stiff with salt from the Channel crossing and stained with oil from the Sparrowhawk, were thick with dust from the day’s cycling. After a week living on the water, her face was tanned as a sailor’s and she hadn’t had a proper wash since La Belle Ecluse. She looked like an urchin. Uncle Hubert and Aunt Vera would be appalled.

The thought gave Lotti a deep satisfaction.

“Do you have any pineapple juice?” she asked the waiter.

“Not had that since the war,” he said firmly.

“Grenadine, then. I’ve got money, I can pay.”

“We don’t have grenadine either.”

Every café had grenadine, it was one of the most basic things you could ask for, but Lotti didn’t argue. The waiter didn’t want her here, and Lotti wasn’t even sure this was the café she had come to with her parents anyway. It looked similar, but that could just be her memory playing tricks on her. It certainly didn’t feel the same.

Later, though, when she was asleep, she saw that day again clearly in a dream—Mama sitting in the sun in her white dress, Papa in his straw hat, even the glass of pineapple juice. But then the glass exploded and turned into the burnt carcass of an airplane. Lotti woke weeping in the small hours and did not go back to sleep.

“Monsieur, I’m sorry to disturb you, this is a picture of my friend’s brother …”

“What’s that, girl? Give it here, I can’t see, my eyes aren’t what they used to be …”

Lotti and Ben spent all of Thursday knocking on doors through the streets of Buisseau, on foot this time, dragging Federico on the lead, with Ben obstinately optimistic and Lotti privately despairing. By the end of the afternoon, the photograph was in a sorry state, worn thin with handling, the gloss of its surface dulled by strangers’ fingers. Clumsily handled by an old man with poor eyesight, it fell apart. Back at the mission house, Ben tried to repair it, but glue only made it worse. Sam’s face was ripped in two, and completely unrecognizable.

“You can still tell it’s him,” Ben insisted. “I can still tell it’s him. We can describe him.”

But now Lotti and Sister Angèle and Sister Marianne all said, “Enough.”