The Garden of Lost Secrets

by Kelly Bowen

Genres: World War II; War & Military; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

Two sisters discover the fairy tales written by their great-grandmother during WWII in this riveting tale of one woman’s secrets lost in the chaos of war—perfect for fans of Julia Kelly and Natasha Lester.
 
1940 - Stasia always found comfort in the idyllic French countryside where she spent her childhood summers, roaming the gardens of an old chateau and finding inspiration for fairy tales full of bravery and adventure. But these days are much darker, and with Nazis storming across Europe, she soon finds herself one of the most hunted agents of the Resistance. The only safe haven she can think of is Chateau de Montissaire. But she’s about to discover that it just may be the center of her biggest mission yet.
 
Present day - When Isabelle purchases a crumbling chateau in Rouen, it’s not just a renovation project—it’s a chance to reconnect with her sister, Emilie, the only family she has left. What she uncovers instead is an intriguing mystery… As the siblings piece together the incredible truth behind the books written by their great-grandmother Stasia, they discover an exciting story of courage in the face of treachery and an explosive secret that will change everything they believed about their family.

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 448

Sample

Chapter1

Stasia


8 June 1935
Rouen, France

The dead man had no boots.

It was the sight of his bare, filthy toes pointed up into the shadows of the narrow alley that made Stasia Neimic stop where she was, her hand frozen on the bars of her bicycle. She had seen dead people before, of course, but those had been as cherished in death as they had been in life and treated accordingly. This man was not cherished. He had been discarded, and Stasia found that realization unbearably sad.

The man had died propped up crookedly against a crumbling brick wall, surrounded by refuse and broken glass. It was difficult to tell how old he was, but the grey in his matted beard and stringy hair suggested that he had been at least her father’s age. He was dressed in the remnants of a soldier’s uniform from two decades ago, the blue greatcoat almost unrecognizable as anything beyond a buttonless, dull grey tatter.

A knot of pedestrians, their arms laden with baskets and bags from the market, hurried by Stasia, their steps quickening even farther past the mouth of the alley as they either deliberately ignored the dead man or simply chose not to see. Stasia opened her mouth to call after them but then closed it, not sure what she would say. What she would ask for. The dead were beyond anybody’s help. But she couldn’t just walk away.

Stasia left her bicycle at the top of the narrow lane and picked her way to the body, ignoring the stench of rotting garbage and urine. She crouched down, taking in the claw-like fingers that, even in death, still clutched the neck of a bottle of gin. The ravages of the contents of that bottle, and undoubtably hundreds before it, were written across his sunken and gaunt face, pale and still beneath the beard.

She should at least cover him with something. His coat, perhaps, until she could find someone to collect him. Or maybe there was something in the alley that she could use to—

“Back away. Don’t touch him.”

The order was snarled, and Stasia shot to her feet, stumbling back.

A boy who couldn’t have been much older than Stasia’s fifteen years shouldered past her and replaced her in a crouch in front of the body. He was tall and lean, wiry muscle cording his forearms, where his threadbare shirt was pushed up over his elbows. His hair was pale blond and cut very short, his face an arrangement of bitter angles and angry planes.

“Did you touch him?” Cold grey eyes pinned her where she stood.

Stasia found her tongue. “No, I was just—”

“Did you take anything?”

Stasia stared at the boy. “I was going to cover him. You think I would steal something from a dead man?”

He looked away from her and was now rummaging in a worn satchel he had slung across his body. He had pulled out a small paper-wrapped bundle. “He’s not dead,” he mumbled.

“What?”

The boy placed the bundle in the man’s lap and reached for the empty bottle clasped in his lifeless hand. “He’s not—”

The man that Stasia had believed dead jerked to life, his eyes snapping open in blind panic, his mouth open in a soundless scream. The arm that held the gin bottle swung wildly, the bottle catching the boy on the side of the head with a hollow thud before shattering. The boy crumpled to the side, and the man in the coat lurched to his feet, only to stagger two steps to the side and collapse again.

Stasia remained frozen where she was for a heartbeat, her breath caught in her throat, too startled to react. The man was now curled in a ball on the ground, his hands over his head, whimpering. The boy had managed to push himself to his hands and knees, a deep gash above his left eye bleeding copiously and leaving bright, scarlet inkblots on the collar and shoulder of his shirt in the dramatic way that scalp lacerations are prone to do. His eyes were squeezed shut, his hands clenched into fists, and he was muttering curses under his breath.

Stasia ignored the man and went to the boy first. “Look at me.”

The boy put a hand to his temple and opened his eyes to inspect his bloody fingers as he drew them away. “Shit,” he groaned.

She put a hand on his shoulder. “Look at me,” she said again in the voice that her grandfather always used when dealing with difficult patients. Direct, firm, but not harsh.

The boy looked up. His eyes were clear and furious as he met her gaze directly. “Don’t touch me,” he snapped, wrenching away from her.

Satisfied that his faculties seemed to be in order, Stasia stood and retreated, eyeing the gash above his eye. “You’re going to need that stitched,” she told him. And that was the truth. She’d stitched less grievous wounds on her grandparents’ ornery gelding.

He ignored her and slowly pushed himself to his feet, pressing the sleeve of his shirt to his wound.

“Did you hear me? You’re going to need that st—”

“I don’t need anything, certainly not from you. This is your fault.”

“I was just trying to help—”

“I don’t need any more of your help,” he spat. “You’ve done more than enough.” He pulled his shirt sleeve away and grimaced at the bloodstain. “Shit,” he muttered again.

Stasia turned her attention to the man still curled on the ground. Very slowly, she crouched beside him, speaking softly to him the way she might with a terrified child. Gently, she took the broken neck of the bottle from his fingers and set it aside before he could do any more damage, to himself or someone else.

“Can you sit up?” she asked the man in the same voice she had used with the boy.

At the sound of her voice, the man stopped whimpering and dragged himself up and away from her. He was trembling, and he clutched his hands over his ears. “I can hear them,” he mumbled. “Always hear them. Always, always. They’re comin’ back. The planes.”

“There are no planes,” Stasia told him.

“I told you not to touch him.” The boy was back, pushing his body between them. He turned, forcing her back another step. “Go away and leave us alone.”

Stasia shook her head, confused at the boy’s reaction. She had expected anger directed toward the man who had struck him. At the very least, she might have expected the boy to disappear, but instead he stayed, ignoring his injury and putting himself between the man and Stasia as though she was the threat. “I didn’t mean to—”

“Leave.” The word was desperate, and it made her pause.

And then retreat.

Stasia stopped where she had left her bicycle but went no farther. She would respect his wishes for the moment but she was not abandoning him. Not until she could assure herself that he was all right. And that he would have his wound tended. Because he hadn’t been entirely wrong when he had said that it was her fault.

She watched as the boy helped the man sit back up against the wall, speaking to him in low tones. Seemingly oblivious to the blood that was still sheeting the side of his face, the boy cast about for the paper bundle that had rolled away in the scuffle. Finding it, he unwrapped it and pressed it into the man’s hands, his voice rising in argument when the man batted it away. It looked like a piece of cake, Stasia thought. Or maybe part of a loaf, though it was hard to tell from where she stood.

She bit her lip. This man hadn’t been discarded after all. She wasn’t sure what or who he was to the boy, and she wasn’t sure of the circumstances that had brought him to this time and this place, but he still had someone who cared, despite his actions. Somehow, this knowledge made her even sadder.

The exchange went on for a while, the conversation or argument rising and falling in volume, the boy’s shoulders slumping and straightening with it. Eventually, he stood and threw up his hands. The man on the ground shouted something unintelligible at him and twisted his face away, his body slouching even farther down the wall. The boy turned, his expression blank, his posture rigid, his eyes firmly on the ground. He stalked toward Stasia, stopping only when he became aware of her presence. The bleeding above his eye had slowed but the skin was already starting to purple and swell.

“Couldn’t help yourself, could you?” he sneered. “Had to stay for the show?”

Stasia blinked. “I don’t understand—”

“I told you to leave us alone.”

“You need to have that cut tended.”

The boy made a rude noise and continued walking. She let him get ahead of her before pulling her bicycle from the wall, pushing it as she followed him at a distance. He was headed west, away from the shops and cafés, across Boulevard des Belges, toward the Hôtel-Dieu. Good. Someone at the hospital would tend to his laceration.

Except he didn’t seem to be heading to the hospital to find a doctor. Instead, he hurried past the gates of the hospital, head down, wiping at the blood on the side of his face with the sleeve of his shirt again. Two women, dressed smartly in summer frocks and heels, deliberately veered away across the cobbled pavement to avoid him, both tucking their handbags more securely beneath their arms, though if he noticed, he gave no indication. Stasia frowned in disbelief, feeling resentful toward the women for their callousness. Surely they had to see that he was injured? Surely someone cared?

The boy turned and continued down the northwest side of the hospital, pausing only when he reached a pair of battered, utilitarian doors set into the long building. Outside these doors, gathered against the building’s stone walls, were stacks of discarded detritus that looked like broken equipment, and it was through this abandoned collection that the boy seemed to be searching for something. From across the street, Stasia watched with bewilderment as he pulled a length of wire from the top of a tangled mess, wound it neatly, and slid it into his bag.

From another pile, he picked an assortment of small parts and pieces, most of which Stasia couldn’t identify, and all of which vanished into his satchel with the same practiced efficiency. When he reached the last stack, he paused before he extracted a small tin wedged between the pile and the building. He tipped it over in his hands and grinned, though it almost immediately turned into a grimace as he touched the side of his face.

One of the doors banged open without warning, and the boy whirled, nimbly jumping to the side. A portly man stumbled out, yelling and waving his fist. Stasia couldn’t hear what he was saying but his fury was obvious and clearly aimed at the bleeding boy, who now had his bag tucked firmly at his side as he sprinted away from the lane. Without looking back, the boy darted behind a news seller and his stacks of papers and then bolted around him, easily outpacing the puffing hospital employee who was attempting to give chase.

Stasia mounted her bicycle and continued to follow him until he finally slowed and, free from any pursuit, started walking south along the lazy curve of the Seine. For a fleeting moment, she wondered if she should simply leave him be. He’d made it more than clear that her help and her presence were not welcome. In the next moment, she knew that she could not—would not—abandon him. He was hurt, partly due to her actions, and he was even heading in the same direction as her grandparents’ farm. Satisfied she had given herself all the justification she needed, Stasia angled her bicycle toward the road.

It wasn’t hard to follow him, though she was glad for the bicycle because she didn’t think she would have been able to keep up with his long-legged strides otherwise. She drew even with him past the port, where to her left, the river’s surface sparkled like diamonds under the bright June sunshine. As he left the city behind, his steps made little puffs of dust that rose and scattered in the breeze, giving a faint chalky scent to the air that was already heavily laced with the pungency of the thick, earthy vegetation lining the river’s edge. Stasia slowed enough to keep pace with him, waiting for him to acknowledge her presence.

He didn’t.

Up close, Stasia could see that the wound was bleeding again. The swelling was worse, enough so that she doubted he was able to see much out of his eye any longer. Dried blood had crusted in his pale hair and above his ear. If the wound pained him, he didn’t show it, but Stasia knew it had to be throbbing with every step he took.

“You really need stitches,” she finally said.

The boy said nothing, merely increasing his pace.

“It wouldn’t take long,” Stasia tried. “And it will heal faster.”

“Go away.” He kicked at a rock in the road. “Leave me alone.”

“No,” she replied pleasantly.

“You’re just going to follow me then?” He still hadn’t looked at her.

“Yes. Until you agree to have your wound tended.”

A humourless bark of laughter escaped. “Tended by whom? You?”

“Yes.”

That seemed to get his attention. He turned his icy grey eyes on her, though the effect was rather tarnished by the fact that one of those eyes was almost completely swollen shut. “Right. Because you’re a doctor.” It was a statement loaded with mocking incredulity.

Stasia was used to that. “Not yet.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means my mother died of polio when I was six. And as soon as I am old enough to attend university, I will apply to the faculty of medicine and become a doctor and figure out how to keep anyone else’s mother or sister or father or son from dying of the same.”

His mouth snapped shut, and he looked away from her.

Stasia was used to that response too. Over the years, she had learned that it was better to tell people things like that up front. They always wondered anyway, and at the very least, it prevented the predictable array of snide comments about her ambitions that she would have received otherwise.

“In the meantime, I have learned some basic skills. Stitching cuts that would otherwise leave nasty scars being one of them.” She steered her bicycle around a divot in the road, trying to keep the wrapped packages in the basket balanced.

Alongside her own satchel was a packet of wooden buttons, new clothespins, rolling paper and two tins of tobacco, a two-pound canister of sugar, and three bricks of lavender-scented soap. All of which had been on the shopping list her grandparents had furnished her with and all of which now sat in her basket. And all of which would be delivered back to them a great deal faster if this obstinate boy would be a little more agreeable.

“My name is Stasia,” she said. “What is yours?”

“You don’t know who I am.” It was a statement and a question all at once, loaded with suspicion.

“Should I? Are you a prince or something?” She kept her voice light but images of the two women who had hastily avoided him and the hospital man chasing him away sprung to her mind.

“You’re clearly not from here.”

She snorted. “You’ve come to that conclusion because I don’t know who you are? That is awfully arrogant, no? You really must be a prince.” She dropped her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Or perhaps a politician.”

The boy was staring out at the river. “Maybe I’ve just come to that conclusion because your French is not good enough to fool me.”

“I wasn’t trying to fool anyone.” Stasia was working hard at perfecting her French, because just good enough at anything had never been good enough for Stasia, but she didn’t appreciate the reminder that she hadn’t entirely mastered the language. “I live in Rotterdam. I stay with my grandparents for the summers. The Moreaus. Do you know them?”

“No.” He tore his gaze from the river and focused on her again. Stasia tried not to wince. The swelling around his eye really was getting worse with each passing moment.

“Where?” he asked.

Stasia waved her hand in the general direction of the thick wood where the river continued to loop south that was a darkened blur from this distance. “The other side of the forest. They have a farm. Wheat and vegetables. Rabbits. Some milk cows and two dozen hogs.”

“Why are you staying with them?”

“My father designs and manages ports. He lives in Rotterdam but he often visits ports all over the world for work. Sometimes I go with him, but in the summers, I come here. My grandparents need the help.” She paused. “This really isn’t fair, you know. I’ve told you an awful lot about me, and you’ve still yet to tell me your name.”

He sent another stone flying with a vicious kick and said nothing.

“Who was the man you tried to help?” she asked abruptly. “The one I thought was dead?”

He remained silent.

“You were kind. Even after he struck you.”

The boy made a strangled noise but didn’t answer.

Stasia counted to twenty before she sighed in exasperation. “Fine. I guess I’ll just call you Thomas.”

“What?”

Stasia pointed at the small tin from behind the hospital that he still held in his hand. It was a blue-and-gold tobacco tin with Usines Thomas Phillipe, Culdessarts emblazoned across the front.

The boy she was calling Thomas only grunted.

They continued on in silence for another two miles or so, Thomas studiously ignoring her, and Stasia coasting along on her bicycle studying him. She wondered if perhaps they would go all the way to Le Havre like this, Thomas too stubborn to acknowledge her and Stasia too stubborn to leave him—

Without warning, he abruptly sprinted off the road down a weed-strewn path, vanishing on a trail crowded on both sides by a riot of trees and shrubs all in desperate need of a pruning. Stasia followed him, wondering how she had never noticed the path before, though her musings were cut short as she was forced to dismount or lose her head to the low, overhanging branches. She hurriedly pushed her bicycle, branches and vines clutching at her calves and catching on the hem of her skirt. Other trails forked away into shadowy footpaths, none of them giving any indication of which one Thomas may have taken. She muttered under her breath, certain that by the time she navigated this overgrown gauntlet, Thomas would be long gone. Which was no doubt the idea.

She picked up her pace, as much as that was possible, choosing the route that accommodated her bicycle, and finally stumbled out of the dense canopy of shade, blinking in the abrupt, brilliant sunshine.

And found she had come face-to-face with an angel.

Forever frozen in time, the angel was caught in flight above a jutting stone pillar, her wings unfurled behind her graceful body toward the heavens. A face sculpted in sorrow gazed down, stone hands extended as if reaching for something she’d never grasp. The carving was haunting and beautiful all at once, and Stasia was certain that she had never seen something so poignant. Especially given the extraordinary garden in which the angel resided.

This was nothing like her grandmother’s neatly ordered kitchen garden. This garden had crumbling stone walls the color of cream that enclosed the space and were covered with bright amethyst flowers bursting from a curtain of emerald. Tall hedges soared around a riotous rainbow of blooms, shading a myriad of mysterious stone paths and opening into small islands of brilliant sunshine like the one she was standing in. Some of the blooms Stasia recognized—the bold crimson-and-tangerine helenium and the lacy blue-and-violet salvia—because her grandmother grew them too, but there were many she didn’t know. Tucked away in the corner was a tiny stone building the same color as the garden walls, squeezed between the umbrella canopies of two dwarf beeches. Rust from the heavy iron handle streaked the lower part of the faded door, while stubborn spots of ancient cobalt paint still clung to the edges of the wood.

Stasia abandoned her bicycle once again, leaning it against the rough bark of a tree, and withdrew her satchel from the basket, slipping it over her shoulder. Captivated, she ventured deeper into the garden. She skirted two massive stone urns, cracked and chipped but still overflowing with greenery as if to make up for it. Trees rose up beyond the far wall of the garden, a dense backdrop of forest filled with cool shadows.

She drew closer to the angel, spinning in a slow circle as she went. It was the sort of place where Stasia couldn’t help imagining beautiful princesses in flowing silver gowns walking beside magical unicorns with flowing silver manes. She could envision fairies and elves flitting about in this hidden, sun-kissed world, and if Stasia listened hard enough, she fancied she could hear the twinkle of their wings under the drone of the bees tending the flowers and the songs of the larks in the branches. Her fingers were itching to pull her pencils from her bag and start drawing the visions that danced in her head—

A low curse jarred her out of her fantasy. As enraptured as she was, Stasia had missed Thomas sitting in the shadow of the stone angel, almost invisible in the tall grass at its base. He cursed again, breaking her enchantment altogether, and she watched as he bent his head in renewed concentration.

Silently, Stasia observed him and, after a moment, realized that he was bent over the stolen tobacco tin, attempting to roll a cigarette. After another moment of covert observation, it became clear that he had never rolled a cigarette before.

“I can show you how to do that if you like,” she offered.

Thomas jerked to his feet, the paper fluttering away and tobacco scattering to the ground like crooked brown snowflakes. “Jesus Christ,” he growled.

“No, just me.”

“What did I do to deserve this? What will it take to get rid of you?”

“Let me tend your cut, and then I’ll leave.”

“I told you I don’t need or want your help. With anything.” He edged farther away from her.

“I don’t really care what you think you don’t need,” Stasia replied, withdrawing a small pouch from her bag.

“What the hell is that?”

“A medical kit. I can clean and suture your wound right here.”

“You’re completely daft, you know that?”

Stasia ignored his hostility. “My grandfather was a stretcher-bearer in the war,” she told him. “The first aid he rendered in the field before he got the soldiers to the ambulances often meant the difference between life and death.”

“I’m not dying,” he snapped.

Stasia ignored that too. “Now he keeps little kits like this with him wherever he goes, just in case. He taught me to do the same. You’d be surprised how often daft turns into helpful.” She took a step toward him.

“You’re not fucking touching me,” he snarled. He took another step back, looking like an injured animal about to bolt.

Stasia stilled. Then, very slowly, she slid the little medical pouch back into her bag. “Fine. I won’t touch you.” She moved away from him. “And I will leave. But not until I draw the angel.”

“Till you do what?”

She pointed above his head. “Draw the angel.”

“Why?”

“I like drawing. And writing stories,” she said easily. That he was still talking to her meant that he hadn’t fled. She was determined to keep it that way.

“About stone angels?”

“About all sorts of things. And this angel looks sad.”

“It’s a piece of rock,” he grated. “Rocks don’t have feelings.”

Stasia wandered around the other side of the sculpture, looking for the best vantage point. She paused as a slate roof and upper row of faceless, rectangular windows became visible over the riot of vibrant greenery. “Oh,” she blurted, “we’re behind Château de Montessaire.”

“Thank God you’re planning to be a doctor and not a detective,” Thomas sniped, and Stasia laughed, which seemed to surprise them both.

She’d seen the same roofline and top floor windows from the road many times before but she’d been distracted and had failed to realize that they were already this close to home. Her grandparents’ farm was on the other side of the forest that bordered the back of this garden. In truth, Château de Montessaire was their closest neighbour, though she had never been on the vast property.

The château had been built at the top of a rolling hill by an early Comte de Cossé in the middle of the eighteenth century, purportedly for his beloved bride, who had died before the château was ever finished. Or at least that was the story Stasia had been told. Château de Montessaire, still in the hands of what remained of the de Cossé family, stood now overlooking the river and the surrounding area, presiding like a sad, lonely, once grand queen over her subjects. But if Stasia had known that this garden existed, she would have visited long before.

She settled down on a patch of grass where the sun’s rays hit the sculpture at the perfect angle. She opened her bag, aware that Thomas was still watching her, and took out her sketch pad.

“You’re serious. You’re still not leaving.”

“After I finish my drawing,” Stasia assured him. “I promise.”

He was silent for a handful of heartbeats, and then he asked, “What else do you have in your bag?”

“My pencils. Receipts for my grandmother. My canteen.”

“Got any food?”

“A biscuit.”

“That’s it?”

“Yes.”

He sighed loudly, as if this were an unforgivable oversight on Stasia’s part.

“Would you like it?” Stasia pulled out the kerchief-wrapped biscuit and offered it to him, thinking of the piece of cake he had left with the man in the alley. “I’m not really hungry.”

Thomas hesitated and then took it from her warily, as if half expecting her to snatch it back. He retreated and shoved the biscuit in his mouth. “It’s a grave,” he said abruptly.

“What is?”

“The angel you’re drawing. Pull back the vines and you’ll see the dates underneath. The dead girl was about your age.” He paused. “Died about sixty years ago and was buried right here,” he added around a mouthful of crumbs.

“Oh?” She reached for her pencil.

“And there’s another one.”

“Another what?”

“Grave. Right beside the angel one. It has a little flat marker but you can’t see it because of all the grass. That one is for an old lady.”

“Mmm.” Her pencil was poised over the paper, yet the first lines that would shape the beautiful sculpture didn’t come. Instead, her gaze dropped from the angel, and now her pencil flew in swift, sure strokes.

“And it’s haunted. This garden.”

“Ghosts are things people make up to keep other people away and out of their business,” she told him.

“Clearly it’s not working very well,” he muttered.

Stasia laughed again.

Thomas threw up his hands and bent to retrieve the cigarette paper from the long blades of grass. “You’re trespassing, you know,” he said.

The image on her page took shape. “So are you.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Of course you are—” Stasia’s pencil froze.

Slowly, she looked up to find that Thomas had resumed his seat under the angel. A new cigarette was being rolled, with even less success than the first.

“You’re not a prince,” she said into the silence.

He made a rude noise but otherwise ignored her.

“You’re not a prince,” she repeated. “You’re the Comte de Cossé.”

Chapter2

Nicolas


8 June 1935
Rouen, France

The Comte de Cossé was long dead.

Everyone knew this, of course, except for this girl from Rotterdam. And the idea that she actually believed that he was the comte of anything was enough to startle a laugh from somewhere deep inside of him. And once that first sound had escaped, another followed, more bubbling and spilling out of him until he was doubled over, gasping for breath, his good eye watering with tears.

It was only the stabbing throb of his face that slowed his laughter. That, and the warm trickle of blood as it slid down the side of his face where his cut had opened again and now splattered onto the edge of the cigarette paper still clutched in his fingers.

“Shit,” he muttered, wiping the edge of the paper, the laughter draining as quickly as it had come, leaving him with a wretched emptiness inside. He closed his good eye and rubbed his temple with the heel of his hand.

“Here.” Long fingers plucked the paper from his, and Nicolas started, unaware that the girl with the eyes the color of expensive brandy, hair the color of dark cinnamon, and wearing a simple blouse and skirt the color of a summer sky, had settled herself beside him on the grass. “You’re wasting your tobacco.”

“Never asked you, did I?” he mumbled but his response lacked any real animosity because he was too distracted watching those quick, capable fingers smooth and then crease the paper with effortless efficiency.

She held out her hand. “Pass me the tin.”

Wordlessly, Nicolas obeyed.

She set the paper in her palm and then pinched a new measure of tobacco, placing it carefully along the paper’s crease. “The trick is to roll it to tighten the tobacco before you try to tuck the paper,” she said, grasping the new cigarette between her thumbs and forefingers and doing just that. “And the gum has to face you along the top.” She slipped the lower edge of the paper beneath the top, rolled it deftly, licked the gummed edge, and ran her thumb along the seal. “All done.” She held out the cigarette.

“How’d you learn to do that?” He took it from her slowly.

“I roll my grandfather’s cigarettes for him. He taught me.”

“He can’t do it on his own?” He regretted the scornful words as soon as he uttered them.

“He lost his fingers on his left hand in the w