All of France has fallen to the Nazis. Rationally, Estella knew this is how the history would play out. Irrationally, she raged. Oliver was gone for the day --- he had started taking classes at the local university --- so no one was around to stop her from throwing a drinking glass against the wall, watching it shatter, calling the pieces back together and starting the violent cycle over.

  Eventually, through repeated rounds of wall abuse, a framed mirror fell and fractured, falling into countless pieces.

  Up until that point, her yells and curses had been more guttural, like an animal rather than a person. Now, seeing that broken glass, her fragmented face reflected in untold pieces, she looked wild and crazed.

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  She shrieked.

  Oliver came home to find her collapsed on the floor; the glass given up at her side. He spotted the newspaper on his way to her. Wordlessly, he held her until she stood on her own.

  Together, they made dinner.

  Estella didn’t write another letter until Christmas. Giving up on Paris felt like giving up on hope, but this time she wrote to Saint Tourre. This time it will arrive, even if Jacques isn’t around to read it.

  The stories, the theories, they bled and blurred together. All sense and meaning as cold and dormant as the chilly New England winter. When Spring finally emerges, Oliver takes her outside and tells her tales of foraging with him grandmother in the woods behind her Summer house.

  The intimacy of his past fills her up with such warmth, Estella cannot imagine ever being cold.