Read Chapter 17: The Missing Poster

The photograph was creased down the middle from years of folding and unfolding, the corners soft as fabric. Evie traced the outline of Lily’s face with her thumb—snapped in a Coney Island photo booth, cheek to cheek, both of them grinning like the world owed them nothing. She had been seventeen. Lily had been fifteen and already looked older.

“This was taken six years ago,” Julien said quietly, peering over her shoulder. “She’ll have changed.”

“I know.” Evie tucked the photograph back into the inner pocket of her coat. “But something in the face stays the same. The eyes, the way someone holds their jaw. I’ll know her.”

They walked through Montmartre as the evening fog rolled off the hill, blotting the streetlamps into amber smears. The cabarets were waking, their doors spilling light and the tinny clatter of rehearsal pianos. Evie had been to Le Chat Bleu the night before with Marcus Webb, but the trumpet player had been vague about directions and drunker than he’d let on. This time, she and Julien had come prepared with questions and a description that Lily’s old roommate in New York had given her before she sailed.

“She sings like she’s got a grudge against God,” the roommate had said, which Evie had taken to mean the girl had developed grit.

They stopped beneath a sagging awning where a laminated poster advertised *“Lily Rose—The Nightingale of Montmartre”* in faded red letters. The image showed a woman in profile, head tilted back, mouth open mid-note. The face was partially obscured by a shadow but the line of the jaw, the sharp angle of the chin, the way she leaned into the microphone as if daring it to bite—Evie’s breath caught.

“That’s her.”

Julien stepped closer, squinting at the poster. “You’re sure?”

“Look at the ears.” Evie pointed. “She’s got a tiny scar on her left lobe. From a childhood accident with a sewing needle. This image is too dark to see it, but the shape of her head, the way her neck cranes—that’s Lily. That’s my sister.”

The venue was called *Le Terrier*, a basement bar half hidden beneath a tobacconist’s shop. The steps down were sticky and sloped, the air thick with spilled wine and smoke from cigarettes too cheap to name. Evie pushed through the door and was met with a wall of sound—an accordion wheezing through a song she didn’t recognize, patrons arguing at the bar, a woman laughing too loudly in the corner.

Julien ducked under a low beam and scanned the room. “Not exactly the Ritz.”

“It’s where she was singing,” Evie said. She approached the bar, where a man in a stained vest was polishing a glass with a rag that had seen better days.

“I’m looking for Lily Rose,” she said. “The singer.”

The bartender didn’t look up. “Don’t know her.”

“The poster outside. The one with her picture.”

He shrugged. “Posters stay up till they rot. She doesn’t work here anymore.”

“Do you know where she went?”

He set the glass down with a clink and finally met her eyes. He had the flat, careful gaze of a man who’d learned not to say too much. “You a friend?”

“Her sister.”

Something flickered across his face—recognition, maybe, or wariness. “She never said she had a sister.”

“She wouldn’t.” Evie she pulled out the photograph. “This is us, six years ago. Before I left New York. I’ve been trying to find her for months. Please.”

The bartender studied the photograph, then studied Evie. He seemed to be weighing something behind his eyes, some calculation of risk versus reward. Finally, he leaned forward and spoke in a low voice. “She was good. Real good. But she started drawing the wrong kind of attention. Men in suits who don’t clap, they just watch. And then one night she finished her set and a man came up to her, whispers something, and she went pale as a ghost. Never came back the next night. Left her things in the dressing room.”

“What kind of man?” Julien asked, stepping closer.

The bartender shook his head. “I don’t ask questions. But I got a name for you. Woman who used to look after Lily, in a way. Took her in when she first came to Paris. If anyone knows where she went, it’d be her.”

He wrote an address on the back of a matchbook. Rue de la Goutte-d’Or, a street Evie knew by reputation—crowded, poor, filled with immigrants and secrets. “Her name’s Madame Cerise. She runs a boarding house. Tell her that Marcel sent you, and maybe she’ll open her door.”

Evie pocketed the matchbook. “Thank you.”

As they climbed back up the stairs, Julien touched her elbow. “This is good news. We have a name. An address.”

“We have a name that might not be real and an address that might be wrong,” Evie said. But she could hear how hopeful her own voice sounded. “Lily’s alive, Julien. She was here, singing, three nights ago. She’s close.”

He stopped at the top of the stairs, turning to face her. The fog had thickened, wrapping the street in a gray hush. “And this Madame Cerise—do you trust her?”

“I don’t trust anyone.” Evie looked down at the matchbook in her hand. “But Lily trusted her enough to stay. That’s good enough for me.”

“Then we go tomorrow.”

“Tonight.”

Julien’s jaw tightened, and for a moment she saw the conflict flash in his eyes—the urge to protect her, to keep her out of dangerous corners of the city after dark, warring with his promise to work with her as an equal. He exhaled slowly. “Tonight. But I’m coming with you.”

“I assumed you were.”

They set off down the hill, past the glowing windows of cafes and the silhouettes of prostitutes and poets sharing the same stoops. The address led them into a maze of narrow lanes where washing lines crisscrossed overhead, dripping onto cobblestones slick with rain that had fallen hours ago. The boarding house was a tall, crooked building squeezed between a butcher shop and a printmaker’s workshop, its shutters closed tight against the night.

Evie knocked. Once, twice. No answer. She was about to knock a third time when a slit in the door opened, revealing a sliver of wrinkled face and a suspicious eye.

“What do you want?”

“I’m looking for Madame Cerise. Marcel sent me.”

The eye blinked. The slit closed. Chains rattled, and the door opened a few inches—enough for Evie to see an elderly woman in a shawl, her hair pinned back tight, her gaze sharp and assessing.

“Marcel’s been paid to keep his mouth shut,” the woman said. “What kind of trouble are you?”

Evie pulled out the photograph again. “Her name is Lily. She’s my sister. I’ve been looking for her across an ocean, and I was told you might know where she’s gone.”

The woman took the photograph, holding it close to her eyes. Her expression shifted—softened, then hardened. She handed it back. “I knew a girl who looked like this. But she was called something else.”

“What?”

Madame Cerise glanced past Evie, at the empty street, at Julien, then back. She lowered her voice to a whisper. “She called herself Étoile. Said she was born under a bad sign, wanted a name that meant something burning.” She paused. “She left a message with me. For if anyone ever came looking.”

Evie’s heart hammered. “What message?”

“She said: *Tell the girl who shares my blood that the man who owns the debt is the man who owns the song.*”

The woman stepped back and closed the door. The latch clicked with a sound of finality.

Evie stood frozen on the doorstep, the words echoing in her skull. The man who owns the debt. The man who owns the debt—Aubanel’s employer. The baron. The anonymous benefactor who had been watching her, surveilling her, holding her passage over her head like an axe.

“Evie?” Julien’s voice came from the fog behind her.

She turned. “Lily knows something. About the man who sent Aubanel. She knows who he is.” Her voice caught. “And she left me a warning about him—before she disappeared.”