The Nightingale

by Kristin Hannah

At first, she was sad to be leaving, and then her anger bloomed, growing hotter even than the air in the back of this stinking car. She was so tired of being considered disposable. First, her papa had abandoned her, and then Vianne had pushed her aside.

Humiliated men could be dangerous.

She wanted to say “Don’t leave me,” but she couldn’t do it, not again. She was so tired of begging people to love her.

She wanted it to be the start of a conversation, but her words fell into the new silence between them and went unanswered. In the quiet, Isabelle felt the suffocating weight of missing him, even though he was holding her hand. Why hadn’t she asked him more questions in their days together, gotten to know everything about him?

“You’re a wonder,” he said. “I am,” she said with a smile.

There were so many terrible aspects to what their lives now were, but there was this, too: friendships forged in fire that had proven to be as strong as iron.

Isabelle hadn’t fully understood it then. She understood it now. She had thought herself indestructible. But what would she have done differently? “Nothing,” she whispered into the darkness. She would do it all again.

“Don’t talk about yourself in the past tense.” “But I am past tense. The girl I was…” “She’s not gone, Isabelle. She’s sick and she’s been treated badly, but she can’t be gone. She had the heart of a lion.”

“You’re as beautiful as I remember,” he said, and she actually laughed, and then she cried. She wiped her eyes, feeling foolish, but tears kept streaming down her face. She was crying for all of it at last—for the pain and loss and fear and anger, for the war and what it had done to her and to all of them, for the knowledge of evil she could never shake, for the horror of where she’d been and what she’d done to survive.

She looked past Gaëtan to her sister, the other half of her. She remembered Maman telling them that someday they would be best friends, that time would stitch their lives together.

Hell, I didn’t even know that people escaped over the mountains or that there was a concentration camp just for women who resisted the Nazis.” “Men tell stories,” I say. It is the truest, simplest answer to his question. “Women get on with it. For us it was a shadow war. There were no parades for us when it was over, no medals or mentions in history books. We did what we had to during the war, and when it was over, we picked up the pieces and started our lives over. Your sister was as desperate to forget it as I was. Maybe that was another mistake I made—letting her forget. Maybe we should have talked about it.”