How strange, thought Ben as the train pulled out of the station, that after all they had been through, this last stage of the journey should be so straightforward. He spent the train ride with a local map borrowed from Sister Monique spread over his knees, tracing and retracing the route between Buisseau and the river. His breathing was short and painful. Three miles, about an hour’s walk from the station at Buisseau, and he would see the last place where Nathan had been alive, and he would speak to the farmer he had stayed with, and he would ask where exactly the survivors of the bombing had been taken and maybe, maybe, tomorrow they would find Sam.

He tried not to think about what it would be like, out there close to where the bombs had fallen.

Lotti, sitting beside him with Federico on her lap, heard Ben’s shallow breathing and watched him trace the map, and thought, Please, please, please let it work.

It was mid-afternoon when they got off the train. As the Reverend Mother had warned them, Buisseau had suffered in the war. The station was dirty, its platform still being rebuilt after suffering shelling. On the main square, there were gaps where once there had been houses, and several shops were boarded up, with FOR SALE signs stuck to the boards. But in the southwest corner, Lotti glimpsed a café terrace … Was this where she had once stopped with her parents on their way to Armande and drunk pineapple juice?

She thought of the sycamore-shaded square in Calais where she had sat with Ben, remembering the time Papa had bought her a secret cake.

How would pineapple juice taste now?

Lotti longed to find out, but she was also afraid … And anyway, Ben did not want to linger, and right now she was here for him. They did not even stop at the mission house to leave their rucksacks, but set out immediately toward the river, following the map.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Nathan had described his lodgings in one of his many letters home, which Ben had kept preciously and knew almost by heart.