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.
I could even understand her not writing me about her dilemma. Why should she? I’d just been a little girl when we last met, someone to protect, not confide ugly things to. And shame could get to be a habit. I wasn’t sure I could have borne to write her about my Little Problem, even if I’d had an address. Face-to-face I could have cried it into her shoulder, but putting these things on paper meant you had to unpack your own disgrace in ugly black and white.
If she was alive, she might be living in Limoges now. Perhaps she had her child with her. A boy or a girl? I thought, and heard myself laugh tremulously. Rose with a baby. I looked down at my own stomach, flat and innocuous, alternately making me tired or nauseated, and my eyes blurred. “Oh, Rosie,” I whispered. “How did we mess up this badly?”
Well, I had messed up. Rose had found love, in the shape of a French bookshop clerk who had joined the Resistance. That sounded like the kind of boy Rose would like. I wondered if her Étienne had been dark or fair, if he’d given his coloring to the baby. I wondered where he’d been taken after his arrest, if