“A smooth sea never trained a skillful sailor.” Danny’s gaze follows her to the sky. “Cooperating with the sea is about accepting its dominance and learning to navigate its moods.”

In battling the sea, there is only one winner. Sharon doesn’t say this; she scoops up the chocolate foam and brings the spoon to her mouth. When Alon volunteered for the submarine, she mistakenly believed that under the water, he would be safe from storms. So much for challenging this beast.

There’s no natural segue to the topic on her mind, and she must broach it before Dominique arrives. “I’ve been thinking about your Jewish star,” she ventures.

He straightens. “Sharon, enough!”

She swallows. “My mother also came with Youth Aliyah, but I can find no information about her.”

“Sorry to hear that. There were thousands of us. Keeping records was secondary.”

“So what’s the message with your tattoo?”

He seems softened by her revelation. “Probably my parents couldn’t have me circumcised.”

“You weren’t circumcised?”

“This will be my last word on this subject.” Danny’s tone is stern. She’s brought him to the edge of his patience. “It was wartime. Either there was no mohel or my parents were in hiding or it wasn’t a good idea to mark me in that classic Jewish way.”

She’s afraid to ask more, but he adds, “Just for the record, I corrected it later. At the children’s home, you know.”

“Ouch.” In the kibbutzim, children are raised by age group, like siblings, boys and girls showering together until just before puberty. As a city girl, she was always appalled by the idea. “That took some guts,” she says.

“It took less courage to do it than to endure the taunting.” He sighs.

He is tired of her being a pest. She views him as a mentor and a friend. He views her merely as an efficient employee. When she falls in love again, it will be with someone like Danny but younger, so she won’t feel as foolish as she does at this moment, knowing he must be regretting asking her to join him at his table.

She gazes at a couple with a little boy crossing the plaza. The parents swing him between them to his squeals of delight.

“Danny, you hired me because you liked my investigative skills.”

“Who’d expect that you’d direct them against me?”

“It’s not against you. I just can’t leave the big question unasked.”

“Which one is that?”

“The tattoo is not on your nose. It’s convenient enough to hide. Who knew that you had it?”

“Meaning?”

“Why were you sent across the sea?”

“Sharon, that’s two questions, and I’ve asked you to stop—”

She doesn’t let him finish the sentence. “Your parents are dead, but many Holocaust survivors have found relatives. Maybe you have some too.”

“Maybe.” His tone is sharp, shutting down the possibility of the question’s meaning. Relatives. Had she presented this probability at another time in his life, would he have wanted to explore it?

“Do you know where you were found?” she asks.

“I never asked.”

He never asked? As a child, she pestered her grandparents, aunts, and uncles with questions about her parents. She still remembers her heartache during the memorial service when she walked among strangers and found that, unlike her late father, Amiram, an artist, a son, a brother, and a friend to many, her late mother, Judith, was only a name etched on the marble wall. Sharon traced the letters onto paper and handed it to those strangers.

“Do you at least know when you were born?” she asks Danny.

“Is that your fourth last question?” He shakes his head in desperation. “I have a made-up birthday. When I was issued a travel pass, my father selected that day as my birthday, October sixth, going back four years earlier, which is what he assessed my age to be.”

“What do you mean, my father?”

“Uzi Yarden. He was the Youth Aliyah agent who found me.” Danny’s eyes narrow. His voice is angry. “Now are we done?”

She feels an engine revving in her. How traumatic it must have been for a little boy to be wrenched away from a family, from a woman he probably called Maman.

“One really last question? Why would your adoptive parents give a four-year-old boy to a stranger from a foreign land?”

Danny slams down his beer stein. “You know what the French say about onions?” He pushes himself from the table and heads toward the downstairs lavatory.

Onions. “Take care of your own onions” is what the French say when they mean “Mind your own business.” Sharon stands up and fishes in her purse for coins to pay for her hot chocolate. If Danny didn’t rely on her so much for work, he might have fired her. The mistake of pushing him too far was entirely her own. In evaluating a suspect’s tolerance arc, an interrogator must assess the subject’s emotional tipping point. She was wrong, and at this moment she’d better remove herself from Danny’s sight.

She’s still buttoning her coat when he returns. “It’s your day off,” she says. “Sorry to have badgered you.”

“Wait.” He sits, motions for her to sit back down, places his elbows on the table, and leans forward. She lowers herself just enough to perch on the edge of the seat, her satchel in her lap. “You’re an orphan too,” he says. “You know how we fantasize about what could have been or what even was to fill in the blanks in memories. I long ago decided not to let such unproductive thoughts interfere with moving forward in my life or allow them to affect the pursuit of my career.” He pauses, and Sharon follows his glance outside, where Dominique is dismounting from her bike. He speaks fast as if to close the subject before his girlfriend enters. “I refuse to inhabit a body that is labeled orphan because I ended up with a great family. I’m the son of Israel, a member of kibbutz Ayelet HaShachar, and an Israeli naval officer with an extraordinary mission in life.”

“Got it.”

He gives her a stern look. “If you got it, then you’ll stick to your assigned projects. Leave my life alone. Can we agree on that?”

She nods, and he gets up to greet Dominique.

Sharon feels her tongue pressing against the roof of her mouth, and her teeth clench. She rises for Dominique’s la bise and says her goodbyes.

As she mounts her bike, Sharon ponders Danny’s declaration. She admires his life philosophy and understands his rebuke. She has become a pest.

His increasing annoyance aside—and their agreement notwithstanding—the star tattoo remains a puzzle. What if he has living relatives? Somewhere, there’s an answer.

Chapter Thirty

Claudette

Barcelona, Spain

Summer 1945

Liberation! It had been a year since the Allies landed on the beaches of Normandy. Claudette could barely breathe at the thought of finally being able to return to Valençay, to her baby. Four months short of his third birthday, Benjamin had to be talking by now. With his two perfect legs, he was running around, reaching with pudgy fingers to catch a butterfly. His eyes were surely green. Was his hair, so fine at birth, still light-colored like hers? Had it taken on a darker hue, the shade of Raphaël’s? Did he have a favorite animal at Léonie’s, perhaps a dog with whom he curled up? Léonie had to be telling him that the mother who loved him so much was coming back soon. Monsieur Vincent was paying the nursemaid for Benjamin’s keep even if he couldn’t transfer funds outside the country to Duchess Silvia de Castellane.

When Claudette first arrived in 1942, Spain was recovering from a civil war, and spirits were high. The duchess’s relatives attended private concerts, flamenco performances, and bullfights. Set free from the solemnity of war raging in the rest of Europe, Claudette let her imagination soar as she created colorful and exotic embellishments for the women’s wardrobes.