Her stomach felt sick. The only thing she could think about was home. Her friends, her school, her own house. Her parents. She never knew that being homesick made you literally sick. She typically wasn't one to be sad, she was just the one who was constantly making jokes and running around so that no one would try to look any deeper.

Yet even now, her pillow was damp with the tears of several months that hadn't had a chance to escape. She never cried. It felt wrong somehow. She was scared someone would come in and see, but she had the door locked and music playing so that if anyone tried, she would play it off as forgetting she locked it, and that would give her enough time to get herself in order.

She couldn't think of a valid reason why her homesickness was a secret, but she couldn't bring herself to tell anyone. She just wasn't the type. She never cried.

Once Madame Besson’s footsteps had retreated down the stairs and Rosa allowed herself to breathe, she realised that the room did not smell like anyone. At home, every room had carried the scent of its owner like an animal: lavender soap, lamp oil, the tang of ink. Here there was only clean linen and a trace of coal smoke, a room scrubbed of everyone who had passed through it.

She set her bag at the foot of the bed, checked that the strap lay within reach, and sat on the mattress with her hands folded, as though the room might be watching. The curtains were already drawn, but she lifted the edge with one finger and looked down at the street. A woman hurried past with a string bag. Two soldiers stood under a dead lamp, laughing at something she could not hear.

She let the curtain fall.

Supper was bread and the thin soup Madame Besson had left on the stove. Rosa made herself finish it, spoon by spoon, because refusing food was a social faux pas whether anyone saw you do it or not, but her stomach turned halfway through the bowl regardless. A slow, rolling nausea settled over her, and she set the spoon down and waited, palms flat on the table, breathing through her nose the way Viola had taught her to on the nights when her hands would not stop shaking. In for four. Hold. Out for six. It passed, mostly, leaving behind a hollow, queasy ache just beneath her ribs. She had not known fear could be physical like this. In Tuscany, fear had lived in her hands and her legs, fear that made her useful, but this, this disgusting feeling like a marble rolling in her stomach was useless, and she resented it.

She went out onto the balcony. Below her the street had emptied toward curfew, leaving only the occasional bicycle ticking past and, somewhere farther off, the grind of a truck changing gears. She thought of the churchyard dog, of all things. She had been afraid of it, had crept around it a hundred times with her heart in her throat, and now she would have given anything to hear it, that furious, offended racket tearing open the dark, proof that something in the world still reacted when a stranger passed.

Paris did not bark, she thought. Paris waited, and watched, and kept its fear indoors.

Paris was not Tuscany.

A door opened somewhere below. Rosa stepped back from the railing out of habit, into the shadow of the wall, and stayed there until it closed.

When she went inside, her face was wet. She stopped, surprised, and touched her cheek with two fingers. She was not a person who cried. She had not cried when Pietro’s shop was emptied onto the pavement, or on the platform, or on the train when the soldiers checked her papers and she counted her own heartbeat. People who were visibly sad, invited questions. Questions invited looking.

But there was no one here to look.

That was the terrible thing, the thing that finally undid her. For the first time in years, nobody was watching.

She locked the door, though it was already locked. She crossed to the narrow bed and lay down fully dressed, and she turned her face into the pillow so that the sound, when it came, would be swallowed by the cotton. It was not a graceful thing. It was small and ugly and breathless, and she kept one ear tuned to the stairwell the whole time, ready to wipe her face and arrange it into neutrality at the first footstep. That, too, was a habit that had outlived its purpose.

On the ceiling, unfamiliar cracks branched toward the corners. She looked for a pattern in them and found none. She traced them anyway, over and over, until her eyes closed on their own.

The city kept its vigil outside. Rosa did not sleep well. But she slept.