Eve called me something even more unprintable than her usual obscenities, and began stalking up and down the side of the road. What a day, I thought as Finn went on fiddling patiently inside the Lagonda. A wretched near-sleepless night in a cheap hotel in Rouen, filled with vague unhappy dreams of Rose disappearing down endless corridors to the accompaniment of her mother’s hissed “Whore . . .” A long awkward drive this morning, Eve commenting caustically every time I had to throw up, and Finn not commenting at all, which was somehow worse.

Whore, my aunt whispered from my nightmares, and I couldn’t stop from flinching. I had so enjoyed the fresh start I’d made on this journey, savoring the fact that no one in this car knew what I was or what kind of cloud I traveled under. Well, that clean slate was an illusion; Charlie St. Clair was a whore, and now everyone here knew it, thanks to that tactless old bat Eve and her flapping mouth.

On the outskirts of Lille, the Lagonda started issuing steam from under its gleaming hood and Finn pulled over and fetched a tool kit from the rear. “Can you get her limping again?” I asked after he announced we had grease on the valves or water in the engine or baby giraffes in the gearshift for all I knew. “At least enough to get us into Lille?”

He was wiping his hands off on a blackened rag as Eve kept stalking about cursing. “If we go slow.”

I nodded without meeting his gaze. I’d barely been able to look him in the eye since my Little Problem had been unveiled. I could brazen things out more with Eve—if she was rude, I could pull my cynical shell back around myself and just be ruder. But Finn didn’t say a word, and I couldn’t out-silent him at the game of let’s see who says less. All I could do was pretend not to care.

We piled back into the Lagonda and headed out at a snail’s pace. Lille seemed like a pretty enough city with its row houses, the touches of Flemish brick on French stone whispering of the city’s closeness to Belgium, and the gracious expanse of the Grand Place. It had been sieged in the war, but clearly not bombed into rubble. There was more cheer here than I’d seen in Le Havre, more spring in the step of the people I saw bustling past with their shopping or their little terriers. Yet Eve grew more and more gray faced the deeper we got into the city.

“‘Any civilian,’” she said, clearly quoting something, “‘including the civilian staff of the French government, who helps troops who are enemies of Germany, or who acts in a way injurious to Germany and her allies, will be punished by death.’”

I shook my head. “Nazis . . .”

“That wasn’t the Nazis.” Eve looked out the window again, face a stony mask. The Lagonda passed a café with a striped awning and street-side tables set out to overlook the De?le, and I looked at it wistfully, remembering the Proven?al café where Rose and I had spent our enchanted afternoon. I wondered if any place on earth had ever made me happier. There was a waitress about my age working in this café, carrying baguettes and a carafe of wine, and I envied her. No Little Problem for her, just freckles on her nose and a red-checked apron and the smell of good baked bread.

Eve’s voice, fierce and cold, broke my thoughts. “They should have burned the entire building to the ground after he was gone, and sowed the earth with salt. They should have run the waters of the real Lethe through it and made everyone forget.” She was staring at the same pretty little café, with its distinctive bowfront window scrolled in gold.

“Gardiner?” Finn looked over his shoulder. Eve’s voice might be fierce but she looked shrunken and frail, her warped fingers twined through each other as if to keep them from shaking. I exchanged puzzled glances with Finn, too baffled to remember I was avoiding his eyes.

“We need to get to a hotel,” he said quietly. “Now.”

He pulled up at the first auberge we found, and rented three rooms. The clerk totaled our room rates wrong and then when I pointed out his error, suddenly couldn’t understand my Americanized French. Finally Eve leaned over the counter and fired off a fluent northern-accented burst that surprised me and had the clerk adjusting his rates in a hurry. “I didn’t know you spoke French so well,” I said, and she just shrugged and slapped a room key into each of our hands.

“Better than you, Yank. Good night.”

I glanced at the sky outside. Just twilight, and none of us had eaten. “Don’t you want supper?”

“I’m taking a liquid supper.” Eve gave a pat to her satchel. I heard the clink of her flask inside. “I’m going to get sloshed to the gills, but if you wait for me to sleep it off tomorrow morning I will bloody well end you. We’d better be up and into that car by dawn, because I want out of this evil pit of a city and I will walk if I have to.”

She disappeared into her rented room, and I was just as quick to vanish into mine. I had no desire to be left alone in the hallway with Finn.

Supper was a cheap packet of sandwiches eaten on my narrow bed. I washed out my underclothes and blouse in the small sink, thinking that I’d need more clothes soon, and finally steeled myself to head downstairs to use the hotel’s telephone. I had no intention of telling my mother where I was going, in case she turned up with the police in tow—I was still underage—but I didn’t want her worrying that I wasn’t safe. Yet the clerk at the Dolphin told me she’d checked out. I left a message anyway, hung up uneasily, and went back upstairs, fighting sudden exhaustion. All I’d done was sit in a car all day, but I was more tired than I’d ever been in my life. These strange waves of tiredness had been hitting me for weeks now, surely another sign of the Little Problem.

I shoved away any thought of the L.P. as I came back to my room. Roubaix tomorrow. Part of me didn’t even want to go—Eve still insisted there was someone she had to talk to, a woman who might know something, but thanks to my aunt I already knew something. I knew Rose had been sent to a little town farther south to have her baby, and I knew she’d left afterward to find work in nearby Limoges. Limoges was where I wanted to go, not Roubaix and whatever dubious contact Eve thought she had.

I sat down on the edge of the bed, and let it rise in my chest: hope. As horrible as that hour with Tante Jeanne had been, she’d given me that hope. Because as much as I struggled to convince myself there was a chance Rose could be alive, part of me had gone on thinking my parents were right, that she must be dead. Because the girl I loved like a sister—the girl who feared loneliness—would have found her way back to us by now.

But if her entire family had rejected her, shipped her off to have her bastard, and then wiped their hands clean . . . Well, I knew Rose. She was proud and full of fire. She wouldn’t ever walk back into the house in Rouen after the way her parents had thrown her out of it.