As Sharon swipes water off her coat, her heart sinks with foreboding. Seas like this are treacherous. For the Israeli navy, though, the damage would be incalculable if . . .

She refuses to finish the thought.

Chapter Sixty

Cherbourg, France

Late December 1969

Danny waits for her in the small vestibule outside the private dining room. In a low voice, he says, “I have so many questions. I don’t know where to begin.”

Sharon throws her coat, hat, and scarf over a nearby couch and pulls out a brush to tame her hair. “Let me give you a quick summary.” She starts with Arthur Durand. “The letter Uzi sent wasn’t clear on the name of the village. Without Rachelle’s lists, I wouldn’t have known where to look.”

“Who was Claudette Pelletier?”

Was. Sharon’s heart goes out to him. He hasn’t come to grips with the fact that his birth mother is alive. “In her youth she was a seamstress to the duchess of Valençay.” Sharon pauses. “She’s disabled.”

“A recent injury? Damage from a concentration camp?”

Sharon doesn’t have the courage to reveal that part yet. “My impression is that she was always disabled.”

“How did she lose me?”

“I don’t know. I’ll travel to meet her after I tie up loose ends here.”

“How did a Jewish girl get the name Pelletier if she wasn’t married to a Frenchman?”

Sharon swallows hard. This is the moment she’s dreaded.

“She isn’t Jewish.” She finally utters the words she promised herself she never would. “Only your father was.”

Danny stares at her, and she can almost hear the wheels in his head spin with a realization of what every secular Israeli knows. “I’m not going through a conversion with those Orthodox rabbis,” he says in suppressed fury. “Never!”

“No one needs to know. It stays between us.” Sharon’s tone is soft. “And it doesn’t change who you are.”

“Of course it does.” Danny turns and pounds the wall with his palm. “I’ve been fighting for the survival of my people—what I thought were my people.”

She rests her hand on his arm. “They are your people. They belong to you, and you to them. You grew up in a kibbutz. What else can you be? And your father was Jewish. He probably perished in the Holocaust.”

Danny swivels back to face her, his nostrils flare in a way she’s never seen before. “That should make me feel better? Does my father’s murder give me the credentials I need as a career Israeli naval officer?”

“All of it combined is what makes you an Israeli. It’s the spirit of our country that makes me an Israeli. Our ethnicity is our religion.”

“I am not even entitled to Israeli citizenship!”

“Nonsense.” Her timing could not have been worse. What has she done? “Danny, you had a French adoptive mother who protected you as a Jew—”

“So my Jewishness is defined by Hitler and Pétain?” Danny drops onto the arm of the nearby sofa.

“Imagine an alternative scenario,” she says. “Imagine that Uzi Yarden hadn’t found you. You would have grown up Christian, hiding your tattoo and knowing in your heart that you belonged with the Jewish people.”

He lowers his chin to his chest. She rests her palm on his shoulder, and he raises his hand to hold on to hers. She lets the moment linger, feeling atoms rushing between their fingers. He is adjusting, resetting some internal wheels.

Yaniv passes by on his way to the dining room. “Is everything all right?”

Danny rises to his feet. Just then, a blast of wind smacks the huge windows on the corridor side.

“How can you sail in such weather?” Sharon calls to Yaniv. Her voice is shrill. “The Saars were never built for these seas!”

Yaniv peers outside. “It may change by midnight.”

His calm enrages her. “And if it doesn’t? It’s suicide!” she yells. “Like the Dakar!”

Danny touches her arm to calm her. “The wind may not subside, but it will shift direction to the northwest.”

The technicality of a storm’s direction is beyond her. “A gale-force-nine storm?”

“We’ve taken everything into consideration,” Yaniv tells her.

“Everything?” She’s a civilian, unbound by military protocol, she reminds herself. Suppressing her fury, she tries to deliver her words in a professional manner. “In our intelligence unit, worse-case scenarios remained open as possibilities. Have you also taken into consideration that the French might bomb the boats?”

Yaniv’s hand pauses on the handle of the door to the dining room. “Sharon, if you can’t hack the stress, you shouldn’t be here.”

She opens her mouth, but before she can reply, he tells Danny, “Please make sure she doesn’t ruin our dinner,” and disappears inside.

Sharon fumes. “So now he silences me?”

“It’s tonight or likely never,” Danny says. “He’ll be commanding Saar Twelve.”

“Sorry,” she mumbles. She’s not, but she can appreciate the courage of this experienced admiral in commanding the most problematic boat. It doesn’t quell her fears.

Danny takes her hands. “I’m the one who should apologize for my outburst.”

“It’s my fault. Given what’s going on around you, I promised myself I’d keep my mouth shut,” she says. “Then, when you said that you might never return to France, I spilled it out at the worst possible moment.”

“There’s a lot to think about. I’ll deal with it another time. Tonight, I owe you my thanks.” He smiles into her eyes. “You’re beyond amazing.”

Sharon looks up into his face, imprinting his features on her memory in case she never sees him again. Her fingers, intertwined with his, feel as if they are on fire. Fear and anguish flood her. She’s grown accustomed to carrying around the ache for Alon. Now, on the verge of healing by the touch of this man, she’s on the edge of another abyss.

She can’t take another loss if Danny’s boat sinks or gets bombed. She will never find peace again, or love. “If I were religious, I would pray,” she whispers.

His hand still holds hers. “Sometimes, at sea, I envy the Traditionalists. They have someone to believe in.”

“So you forgive me for butting into your onions?”

“You certainly have a way of being exasperating at times.” He scoffs. “Just one last question for tonight.” She giggles as they both remember her many last questions. “Why? Why did you do this sleuthing?”

She sighs. “I’m a yenta who can’t leave puzzles unsolved. It’s my worst trait.”