The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah

cheek, by the way.”
Vianne wiped her cheek absently and leaned over the pram. The baby was sleeping soundly. “How’s
he doing?”
“For a ten-month-old who is supposed to be at home with his maman and is instead gallivanting
around town beneath enemy aeroplanes and listening to ten-year-old students shriek all day? Fine.” She
smiled and pushed a damp ringlet from her face as they headed down the corridor. “Do I sound bitter?”
“No more than the rest of us.”
“Ha! Bitterness would do you good. All that smiling and pretending of yours would give me hives.”
Rachel bumped the pram down the three stone steps and onto the walkway that led to the grassy
play area that had once been an exercise arena for horses and a delivery area for tradesmen. A fourhundred-year-old
stone fountain gurgled and dripped water in the center of the yard.
“Come on, girls!” Rachel called out to Sophie and Sarah, who were sitting together on a park bench.
The girls responded immediately and fell into step ahead of the women, chattering constantly, their
heads cocked together, their hands clasped. A second generation of best friends.
They turned into an alleyway and came out on rue Victor Hugo, right in front of a bistro where old
men sat on ironwork chairs, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes and talking politics. Ahead of them,
Vianne saw a haggard trio of women limping along, their clothes tattered, their faces yellow with dust.
“Poor women,” Rachel said with a sigh. “Hélène Ruelle told me this morning that at least a dozen
refugees came to town late last night. The stories they bring are not good. But no one embellishes a
story like Hélène.”
Ordinarily Vianne would make a comment about what a gossip Hélène was, but she couldn’t be glib.
According to Papa, Isabelle had left Paris days ago. She still hadn’t arrived at Le Jardin. “I’m worried
about Isabelle,” she said.
Rachel linked her arm through Vianne’s. “Do you remember the first time your sister ran away from
that boarding school in Lyon?”
“She was seven years old.”
“She made it all the way to Amboise. Alone. With no money. She spent two nights in the woods and
talked her way onto the train.”
Vianne barely remembered anything of that time except for her own grief. When she’d lost the first
baby, she’d fallen into despair. The lost year, Antoine called it. That was how she thought of it, too.
When Antoine told her he was taking Isabelle to Paris, and to Papa, Vianne had been—God help her—
relieved.
Was it any surprise that Isabelle had run away from the boarding school to which she’d been sent?
To this day, Vianne felt an abiding shame at how she had treated her baby sister.
“She was nine the first time she made it to Paris,” Vianne said, trying to find comfort in the familiar
story. Isabelle was tough and driven and determined; she always had been.
“If I’m not mistaken, she was expelled two years later for running away from school to see a
traveling circus. Or was that when she climbed out of the second-floor dormitory window using a