The Woman with the Blue Star, Pam Jenoff [highly recommended books txt] 📗

then, realizing how grand it must look after the awful places she had lived. For a second, I wondered if she might resent me for it. But there was no time to worry. I put my finger to my lips to signal that she should be quiet so the neighbors would not hear us. At the back of the house, I unlocked the door and let her inside.

I started up the servants’ staircase, but behind me, Sadie stopped. “Ella, it isn’t safe for me to be here,” she whispered, too loudly.

“My stepmother is out for the evening,” I reassured her, urging her up one flight of stairs and then two more to the garret.

“Have a seat,” I said. Sadie hesitated, looking awkwardly around my room, and I realized she did not want to stain anything with her dirty clothes. I laid a throw blanket across the soft chair where I liked to draw and read. “There.” I noticed then how pale and tired she looked. “When was the last time you ate?” She did not answer, and I wondered whether she could not remember or did not want to say. “I’ll be right back.” I scampered back down the stairs to the kitchen and pulled a plate of meat and cheese from the icebox, too rushed now to care if Hanna noticed them missing, and carried them back upstairs.

Sadie had moved the chair close to the window and was looking at the sky once more. “You have a lovely room,” she remarked. “It’s the view I admire the most. You paint?” she asked, noticing my art supplies in the corner. A canvas sat propped up against the wall, a picture of the city skyline I had started working on some time ago but had not finished.

I shrugged. “A bit.” Embarrassed, I tried to block the canvas from view, but she moved closer to see it. “That’s wonderful, Ella. You’ve got real talent.”

“It’s so hard to think about art with the war now. I’ve sort of given up.”

“Oh, you shouldn’t! You should paint now more than ever. You mustn’t let the war steal your dreams.” A sad look crossed her face. “But who am I to talk?”

“What do you want to be?”

“A doctor.”

“Not an astronomer?” I teased, remembering how captivated she was by the stars.

“I like astronomy, all of the sciences, really,” she answered earnestly. “But it’s healing people that interests me the most, which is why I wanted to be a doctor. I still do.” She looked at me unblinkingly. “If I can find somewhere to study after the war.” I was awed by the scope of her dreams, unmuted by all that had happened.

“You will,” I said, wanting to encourage her ambitions as much as she had mine. I set the plate of food on the low table beside the chair. “For you.”

She did not take any, but stared at the plate. “That’s very nice china.”

I considered the flower-edged dish for the first time. It was one of our everyday plates and I had never given it a second thought. Seeing it through Sadie’s eyes now, I remembered that the plate was part of a set my mother had gotten as a wedding gift from her parents—a connection to a lost world. “You should eat,” I said.

Still, Sadie did not. “The others... I should take this back to the sewer and share it,” she said guiltily.

“There will be more for them. You are going to need your strength to carry food back. Eat,” I urged.

Reluctantly, she took a piece of cheese and put it in her mouth. “Thank you,” she said as I handed her more food. She turned toward the portrait on my desk, my parents, siblings and me by the seashore. “Your family?”

I nodded and pointed to the baby in my mother’s arms. “That’s me. And that,” I added, pointing to Maciej, “is my brother, who lives in Paris. I’m hoping to go live with him.”

“You’re leaving?” Her voice was tinged with a note of sadness and surprise.

“Not now,” I said quickly. “Maybe after the war.”

Sadie reached out and pulled another photo from behind my family portrait. “That’s Krys, yes?” I nodded. I had meant to put away the photo of Krys in his army uniform, taken just before he left for the war.

“We were almost engaged before the war. He left to fight, and when he came back, he didn’t want me anymore.” Though Krys had told me about the real reason he had stayed away, the rejection still stung.

“I’m sorry,” Sadie said, putting her hand on mine. It felt silly, pathetic even, to have her comfort me when she was the one who was suffering. But it was the first time I’d really been able to confide my feelings in anyone since it had all happened. “I’m sure that can’t be true,” she added.

“He says it isn’t,” I sniffed, seeming mollified. “He told me he is doing some work to fight the Germans and that he must stay away because it is dangerous.”

“See? He’s just trying to protect you. I could hear him on the street that day and he sounded so concerned. When the war is over and the danger is passed, he’ll come back to you and you can be together.” We both knew that promises of life after the war were too uncertain to mean much, but she was trying to offer whatever comfort she could.

“I’ve never had a boyfriend,” Sadie admitted.

“No?”

She shook her head. “Honestly, I’ve always been awkward and felt more comfortable around my books than boys.”

“Surely there’s someone...”

“Not at all!” she protested, but I could tell by the catch in her voice that the opposite was true.

“Saul?” I pressed, recalling the name she had mentioned.

“Yes,” she admitted. “But it isn’t like that.”

“It is exactly like that. I can tell by your face,” I teased, and we both laughed.

“No, really.” Her cheeks flushed. “His family is more religious and he’s a few years older and he doesn’t think of me