The Librarian Spy(106)
“I have been trying to find my normalcy here,” Ava said aloud as she puzzled out the details herself. “But it’s not fitting because I’m not the same person I was before.”
“Sounds pretty quixotic.” He winked at her.
She laughed. “Yeah, it is.”
“So, where are you going to go?”
Ava didn’t even have to think. “To England, to see about a position at the London Library.”
“I’ve always wanted to see London.” Daniel nodded in approval. “I’ll have to plan a visit.”
Ava beamed at him. “I’d love that.”
Daniel studied the letters in front of him and turned them toward her. “All right, Ava, what can you do with this jumble of madness?”
She studied the small blocks, then referred to the board for other words she could play off. Using the first I of QUIXOTIC and an E from SEEN, she spelled out the word FULFILLED.
An appropriate and perfect word to describe what they had both realized and where they were both going to be.
EPILOGUE
Elaine
The day after Etienne killed Werner, the Nazis fled. Explosions filled all of Lyon as they blew up the bridges behind them to keep the Allies from giving chase. The cowards.
General de Gaulle himself arrived two weeks later and honored Lyon by declaring it the capital of the Resistance. The day was one of great victory that seeded itself in Elaine’s soul, for in that veneration was the appreciation for brutal sacrifices. For those who had been strong enough to endure torture. For those who had paid with their lives. For those whose hearts had been gouged from people they’d lost.
At last, she had heard from her parents. As she had hoped, they fared better than most through the occupation. Their time in the small rural town whose doldrum existence she had resented in her youth had been their salvation, providing them with enough produce to make it through the leaner years.
Prisoners did not return from the camps until the beginning of 1945, and when they did, France was horrified at the zombie-like people who arrived, bone-thin with large haunted eyes set in skulls with only taut skin stretched over them. The ration was still enforced, though not to the strict standards of when Lyon was under German occupation. But when the people from the camps returned, there was not a soul in France who did not offer their own share to help feed them.
Denise returned a month into the prisoners’ liberation, skeletal like all the others, and missing several teeth, but with that familiar fire still bright in her gaze.
It was with their arrival that Elaine found new purpose. So vast was the number of people seeking family members, that she printed lists of survivors to reunite them with who had been lost. She relocated the heavy printing press once more, this time to a room with a wide window facing the street to let in sunshine and make her efforts known. It was from there the Minerva put forth the power of words, no longer enlisting an army to fight hate but reuniting friends and family and restoring love.
It was through those lists that she found Nicole’s father, Olivier, who towered well over six feet and bore the same heart-shaped mole on his emaciated arm. He listened to the tales of Nicole’s bravery with tears in his eyes and confirmed that it was through her packages that he and his son had managed to survive. Nicole’s sister and brother-in-law both made it through their ordeal in Germany as well, and every night the four of them said a prayer for the empty seat at the table that lay between them.
Josette never fully recovered from her precarious state, her nature too delicate to endure the prolonged stress. Elaine had visited once under the disapproving glare of Josette’s mother, who blamed Elaine and the rest of the Resistance for what happened to Josette. Though Elaine wanted to return, her mother barred any future visits.
Lucie did not come back to France. Nor did her husband, both having perished in a camp in Poland called Auschwitz. Every image of the terrible place made Elaine recall her friend who had always been so beautifully optimistic and ache for what she must have endured.
Elaine returned to her home eventually at Rue du Plat, pausing outside with poignancy at what lay on the other side. Not the layers of dust, but the memories of a life that seemed to have belonged to someone else.
When at last she entered, she found an envelope just inside the entryway, a scrape of dust in its wake from where it had been shoved beneath the door. She kept it pinched between her fingers as she slowly walked through those once-familiar rooms. To the sunny kitchen where she used to pore over issues of Combat, back before she’d ever known what a printing press looked like, let alone how to operate one. To the armchair in the living room where Joseph would bend over his research, his warm brown gaze distant with calculations. To the bedchamber where they had slept in one another’s arms until she allowed his need to keep her safe to drive a wedge between them.
Tears burned in her eyes.
What she wouldn’t give to have those days back, to set aside her anger and still allow herself to revel in their love. She entered the bathroom last where the spice of his cologne still lingered two years later.
It was then that her knees gave out and she sank to the floor in a fit of sobs for the man she loved. The man who was gone forever.
When at last her tears had dried, she remembered the letter still in her hand. She drew back the top to reveal a note inside along with an identity card for Hélène Bélanger.