Excerpt from Girl in the Blue Coat by Monica Hesse, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Mrs. Janssen's husband disappeared last month, just before she became a customer, and I've never asked any more about that. He could have been an illegal worker with the resistance, or he could have just been in the wrong place at a bad time, or he could be not dead after all and instead having high tea in England with his oldest son, but in any case it's none of my business. I've only delivered a few things to Mrs. Janssen. I knew her son Jan a little bit. He was a surprise baby, born two decades after his brothers, when the Janssens were already stooped and gray. Jan was a nice boy.

Here, today, I decide Jan might have been near Bas when the Germans stormed our country. Here, today, I'll believe that Bas didn't die alone. It's a more optimistic thought than I usually allow myself to have.

Mrs. Janssen is waiting at the door for me, which makes me irritated because if you were a German soldier assigned to look for suspicious things, what would you think of an old woman waiting for a strange girl on a bicycle?

"Good morning, Mrs. Janssen. You didn't have to stand out here for me. How are you?"

"I'm fine!" she shouts, like she's reading lines in a play, nervously touching the white curls escaping from her bun. Her hair is always in a bun, and her glasses are always slipping down her nose; her clothes always remind me of a curtain or a sofa. "Won't you come in?"

"I couldn't get as much sausage as you wanted, but I do have some," I tell her once I've parked my bicycle and the door is closed behind us. She moves slowly; she walks with a cane now and rarely leaves the house anymore. She told me she got the cane when Jan died. I don't know if there's something physically wrong with her or if grief just broke her and made her lame.

Inside, her front room looks more spacious than normal, and it takes me a moment to figure out why. Normally, between the china cabinet and the armchair, there is an opklapbed, a small bed that looks like a bookcase but can be folded out for sleeping when guests visit. I assume Mr. Janssen made it, like he made all the things in their house. Mama and I used to walk past his furniture store to admire the window displays, but we never could have afforded anything in it. I can't imagine where the opklapbed has gone. If Mrs. Janssen sold it so soon after her husband's disappearance, she must already be struggling with money, which I won't allow to be my concern unless it means she can't pay me.

"Coffee, Hanneke?" In front of me, Mrs. Janssen disappears into the kitchen, so I follow. I plan to decline her coffee offer, but she's laid out two cups and her good china, blue and white, the famous style from the city of Delft. The table is heavy and maple.

"I have the sausage here if you want to—"

"Later," she interrupts. "Later. First, we'll have coffee, and a stroopwafel, and we'll talk."

Next to her sits a dust-covered canister that smells like the earth. Real coffee beans. I wonder how long she's been saving them. The stroopwafels, too. People don't use their bakery rations for fancy pastries; they use them for bread. Then again, they don't use them to feed black market delivery girls, either, but here is Mrs. Janssen, pouring my coffee into a porcelain cup and placing a stroopwafel on top so that the waffle sandwich softens in the steam and the sugary syrup inside oozes around the edges.

"Sit, Hanneke."

"I'm not hungry," I say, even as my stomach betrays me with a growl.

I am hungry, but something makes me nervous with these stroopwafels, and with how eager Mrs. Janssen is to have me sit, and with the irregularity of the whole situation. Has she called the Green Police and promised to deliver them a black market worker? A woman desperate enough to sell her husband's opklapbed might do such a thing.

Excerpted from Girl in the Blue Coat by Monica Hesse. Copyright © 2016 by Monica Hesse. Excerpted by permission of Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.