Read Chapter 15: The Widow's Anger

The air in the fish market had turned sharp with the tide, all brine and rust and the rot of yesterday’s catch. Elise kept her head down, cycling past the stalls with her satchel heavy against her hip, but the widow Mouriaux was faster than a gull on a dropped mackerel.

She stepped directly into Elise’s path, and Elise had to wrench the handlebars sideways to avoid clipping her. The bicycle skidded on wet cobbles, and she nearly went down before she planted a boot.

“You.” The word came out like a knife drawn from a sheath.

Elise looked up. Madame Mouriaux was a small woman, all hard angles and sharp wool, but her face had gone the color of boiled beetroot, and her hands—those hands that had once delivered a stillborn’s shroud to the church with more tenderness than any priest—were balled into fists at her sides.

“Madame Mouriaux. I was meaning to call on you—” Elise began.

“Call on me.” The widow’s voice cracked. “Call on me. My son was taken at dawn. Three men in field coats. They didn’t even knock. They kicked the door in, Elise. They kicked my door in and dragged him out in his nightshirt, and he looked at me over his shoulder, and I could see he thought I had done something. That I had failed him.”

Elise’s stomach dropped. She knew the boy. Paul Mouriaux was seventeen, a quiet, clumsy boy who helped his mother mend nets on the harbor front and who had once—when the Germans first came—been caught by a patrol for whistling a French tune. He had been released with a beating. Everyone knew Paul Mouriaux was not a resistance man. He was barely a man at all.

But the list. The list had forty-three names, and Elise had recognized several. She had not recognized Paul’s name because she had not read it closely enough. She had been too busy racing from door to door with Jameson, too focused on the ones she could still save.

“They took his letters,” the widow said, stepping closer. Her breath was hot and sour. “They stood in my kitchen and went through his drawer like it was a criminal’s lair. His letters, Elise. From his cousin in Saint-Malo. They said the letters were marked. That they were proof.”

Proof. That blasted word. The marks Le Gallez had been forced to make, the little scratches in the corners of envelopes, the code that the scarred man had used to build his trap. Elise had thought the letters were surveillance—German officers watching islanders who wrote to the mainland. But the widow’s words landed like a stone in her gut.

They weren’t watching. They were culling.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Elise said, and hated herself for the lie, for the practiced calm in her own voice.

The widow’s fist came up, and for a moment Elise thought the woman would strike her. Instead, Madame Mouriaux grabbed the collar of Elise’s coat and yanked her forward until their faces were inches apart. Her eyes were wet, and the wetness made her look older, more broken, her fury giving way to something desperate.

“You know,” the widow hissed. “You know something. You’ve been riding that bicycle of yours all over this island, whispering in doorways, hiding in hedgerows. You think people don’t see? You think we don’t all watch you and that doctor, with your heads together, and now my son is gone, and you’re still pedaling around like a saint on a Sunday.”

“Madame, please—” Elise tried to pull back, but the widow’s grip held.

“My husband pulled your brother out of the water when he was nine. Off the pier at Petit Port. You remember that, don’t you? You remember how Jean-Michel went in after the gulls’ eggs and the tide took him, and my husband swam out in his Sunday coat and dragged him back by the hair, half drowned and screaming.” The widow’s voice broke again, but she pressed on. “We never asked for anything. Not a penny. Not a prayer. My husband said, ‘A life is a life, and the Martin boy is a good one.’ He said that. He said that until the day he died, and now you stand there and pretend you don’t know why my son is gone.”

Elise’s throat tightened. She remembered. She had been twelve, small for her age, standing on the shore with her mother’s hand digging into her shoulder while the men shouted and the gray water churned. Jean-Michel had gone under twice before the harbormaster reached him. The water had been so cold, and her brother’s face had been so pale, and she had promised God that if Jean-Michel lived, she would be good forever.

She had broken that promise a hundred times since. And now the harbormaster’s widow was looking at her like she was the tide itself, indifferent and merciless.

“I will find out what I can,” Elise said quietly.

The widow released her coat with a shove that sent Elise stumbling back against her bicycle. “You’ll find out,” she repeated, bitter. “You’ll find out, and you’ll peddle it around like fish scraps, and my son will rot in some camp on the mainland while you keep your pretty little secrets. My husband saved your brother’s life, Elise Martin. And I’m telling you now, that debt is paid. Whatever you owed this family, it’s done. We’re square. The next time you ride past my door, you ride past a stranger.”

She turned and walked away, her back straight as a mast, and the market women who had been pretending not to watch parted around her like water around a rock.

Elise stood there, her hands shaking on the handlebars. The fishmonger at the stall opposite gave her a look of pure contempt. He had heard. They had all heard. The widow’s voice had carried like a ship’s horn, and now every soul in the market square knew that Elise Martin had been called out, had been accused, had been cut loose by the one family that had ever shown her brother grace.

She got back on her bicycle and pedaled. Her legs felt like lead, her ribs too tight around her heart. Paul Mouriaux. She kept seeing his face, the soft, frightened look he wore whenever a German was near. He wouldn’t survive a camp. He was too gentle, too bewildered by cruelty. They would eat him alive.

Ahead of her, the road twisted up toward the high street, and she almost missed it—a flicker of movement in the mouth of a narrow alley between the cobbler’s and the closed bakery. A figure, half in shadow, watching her.

She knew the shape of him now even in silhouette. The scarred man. He didn’t follow her this time. He stood perfectly still, hands at his sides, the right one catching a sliver of light that glinted off the ridged, pale skin of his wrist. He was letting her see him. Letting her know he was there, that he had heard the widow’s accusations from whatever corner he had been lurking in, that he had added another piece to the picture he was building of her.

And then he turned and vanished into the alley, and the street went back to ordinary, and Elise felt the cold of the channel wind seep through her coat like a warning.

She had told herself she was hunting him. But the truth, whispered on that wind and sharp as barnacles, was that he had been hunting her all along. And now he knew that she had been seen—openly, publicly—as someone who carried secrets. Someone who could be squeezed, or broke, or buried.

The widow had paid her debt in anger, but the scarred man had just collected his own payment in watchfulness. He had her measure now, Elise realized. And she had given it to him without knowing, standing frozen in a fish market while a grieving woman screamed her name.