What a daft question. Of course I want to get out and find where my sister went.Someone in the neighbourhood is bound to know. She might be staying with a friend or a neighbour.
I block from my mind the other option—the one I cannot face.
“Yes.” I pay him without voicing any of this to him and climb out, holding Anna close to my chest.
I walk to the path leading to where the front door once stood and stop. I put my valise down next to me, my gaze not shifting from the house. I’m vaguely aware of the taxi driving away, but other than that, the world stands motionless.
Hazel and Charles weren’t in the house when it was bombed. The air-raid sirens would have gone off, and they escaped to the nearest shelter. They’re alive. I know it. I just have to discover where they went. Perhaps one of their neighbours could tell me.
Shuffled footsteps warn me someone is approaching on my left. My muscles turn to concrete, but I don’t have it in me to turn to see who it is.
“Bloody Jerrys.” The crackly voice is that of an elderly man. “I hope once this war is over, Churchill kills the lot of ’em.” The venom in his voice is enough to take out a troop of armed men.
My gaze remains on the house. “Did they escape?” My voice is not much more than a raspy murmur.
“Who? Hazel and her young’un?”
It’s only then that I look at the man. “Hazel has a child?”
“A baby. She was about this one’s age.” He nods to Anna in my arms.
My insides shift, no longer stable, ready to crumple like one of the shell-hit homes. “Was?”
He nods again. “Both Hazel and the baby died in the bombin’.”
My legs give out from under me as if they’ve turned to smoke. If not for the man steadying me with his arm around my waist, I would have gone down.
A sob is yanked from my lungs.Too late. Too late. Too late.
The only thing that barely got me through losing the man I loved was knowing one day soon I would have a chance to repair things with my sister.
But I am too late.
Anna fusses in my arm, responding to my distress.
“What about Charles? Did he get out of the house in time?”
“Charles has been dead for seven months now. From what I heard, his plane went down over France. No survivors.”
I close my eyes against his words. So many questions and possibilities twist in my head. Charles’s plane could have landed, but he hasn’t yet found his way to one of the escape routes. Or he was recovering from an injury and is on his way over the Pyrénées mountains at this very moment.
Hope flickers, but it extinguishes as quickly as it flared up. The odds of him surviving this long is low, especially if he was injured. If the Germans captured him, he might be as good as dead.
“How do they know there were no survivors?” Unshed tears turn the man blurry.
He hitches his shoulders. “I wasn’t there when his body was recovered, so I can’t answer the question. I just know what Hazel told me.”
Oh, God.And I wasn’t here for her when she needed me the most. I was in France, recovering from my wounds, waiting for Johann to return to Dr. Hubert and Rosita’s home.
I look at the house and my legs propel me towards it.
“You can’t go in there,” the man calls after me. “It ain’t safe.”
I sniff, tears dripping onto Anna’s blanket—the soft pink blanket Vera had given me when Anna and I landed on English soil. “That was my sister’s house. I need to go in there.” I need to find something that will keep her forever close to me.
“Like I said,” the man grumbles, “bloody Jerrys. The lot of them.” He spits at the ground.
“Could you watch my bag please? I won’t be long.” I don’t wait for his reply.
