The Room on Rue Amélie(65)

And so three weeks after her work on the line had ground to a halt, Ruby roused Charlotte early on a Saturday morning. “Would you like to go for a walk?”

Charlotte rubbed the sleep out of her eyes. “A walk?”

“Past the old apartment. Just to see.”

“But I thought you said it was too dangerous for me to come with you.”

“It’s cold out. You’ll wear a hat and a scarf, and we won’t get close enough to encounter old neighbors. Besides, I can’t leave you alone.” In fact, since news of the arrests had come down, Ruby had barely let Charlotte out of her sight. She knew she was probably driving the poor girl crazy, but what choice did she have?

“Do you think it’s very cold where my parents are?” Charlotte asked as they walked briskly south through Passy a half hour later. German transport vehicles full of soldiers rumbled down the avenues, and Nazi flags stained the city red, like a bad rash.

Ruby hesitated. “Yes. But I think they are all right.”

“You can’t know that.”

“Sometimes you have to believe in things you cannot see.”

Their breaths were clouds of air. “Like religion,” Charlotte said at last. “Like the way we must believe in God even when we can’t see Him.”

Ruby glanced at her. They hadn’t spoken of God much; it seemed a dangerous topic in these times, and Ruby herself wasn’t exactly a dedicated churchgoer. But she agreed with what Charlotte was saying. “Yes. Much like that, Charlotte. Faith.”

“Faith that in the end, we’ll all be okay.”

Ruby nodded, but she was suddenly too choked up to reply. She did believe in God—she always had—but she’d been struggling lately to understand how He was letting this war happen.

They reached the rue Amélie more quickly than Ruby had expected. As they rounded the corner onto the street where their lives had first intertwined, Ruby reached for Charlotte’s hand. The girl was trembling, and Ruby had the feeling it wasn’t just from the cold. “Are you all right?” she asked.

“Yes,” Charlotte said, her voice strong and clear. “It’s just that living across the river makes me feel as if we’ve reinvented ourselves. But here, you are still you and I am still me, even if we’re pretending to be something different. It means we have to face what we’ve left behind.”

Ruby squeezed Charlotte’s hand. “I couldn’t have said it better myself.”

They slowed as they walked by the building, but they couldn’t stop; they couldn’t make themselves stand out. The tip of the Eiffel Tower appeared ahead of them, grand and beautiful, and Ruby was reminded of the early days of her marriage, when she’d sat on her tiny terrace, rejoicing in the knowledge that she was really here, really in Paris. But the tower no longer meant what it used to, and the view also triggered memories of staring out the window after the baby died. This apartment had been the site of much sadness, but it had also been the place where she’d met Charlotte and Thomas. The bitter always came with the sweet.

“Are you thinking about Thomas?” Charlotte asked as they reached the end of the block. “I know you think of him often.”

“I suppose I’m thinking of all the things that happened here. I was lucky to have lived here. I was lucky to have met you.”

This time, it was Charlotte who squeezed Ruby’s hand comfortingly. “And I, you.”

They circled the block twice more, but there was no movement in or near the old building. It was merely a ghost of another time and place.

They were mostly silent as they made their way back across the Seine. “Do you really believe they’ll find us if they come back?” Charlotte asked as they turned left onto the rue Boissière. “My parents? Thomas? The people from our old lives?”

“Yes, I do.”

Charlotte looked at her. “But how can you be so sure?”

“Because fate isn’t so cruel that it would return them to Paris and keep them from us,” Ruby said. She just wished she could believe her own words.

When they rounded the corner of the stairs on the second floor of their new building some twenty minutes later, Ruby was startled to see a young man waiting for them on the doorstep. For a moment, she thought it might be a pilot. But then he turned, and she realized he was at least a few years too young. He was fifteen, maybe sixteen, with a curly mop of dark hair and piercing, hooded green eyes.

“Where have you been?” Charlotte asked, quickening her pace and embracing him. His eyes met Ruby’s over the top of Charlotte’s head.

“Hello,” he said calmly. “I’m Lucien.”

Charlotte pulled away, her face red, and glanced at Ruby.

Ruby raised an eyebrow. “You’re the forger. The one Char—Hélène—told me about?”

His smile widened a bit. “Ah, so she speaks of me? This is good news.” They both glanced at Charlotte, whose face had turned an even deeper shade of red as she was studying the floor. “Yes, I am the forger. Among other things. Today, though, I am a messenger. May I come in?”

Ruby hesitated. The boy seemed nice enough, but there was something about him that made her uneasy. Or was she just reacting to the way Charlotte was behaving? This was no time for idle crushes. Especially not for a child. Ruby shook the thought off quickly. She wasn’t being fair. “Yes, of course. Come in.”