Excerpt from News of Our Loved Ones by Abigail DeWitt, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

But she might have imagined last night’s sirens.

Any minute now, Maman would call her down to breakfast, to a watery bowl of chicory that satisfied no craving. Why go down when her bedroom, even in the early morning gloom, was so beautiful and was hers alone? She wanted to open her shutters and breathe in the smell of honeysuckle and seagulls, of the dusty pear trees across the road, but then everyone would know she was awake and there would be no excuse for staying in bed. She gazed up at the spines of her books, at Mirabelle’s lone porcelain foot sticking out from the shelf. The doll sat with the books, placed with the other M’s (Molière, Montesquieu) to keep things in alphabetical order. A sock dangled from Mirabelle’s foot and below her stood the small armoire, with its fleur-de-lis, its fluted edges—who had done this, Yvonne wondered, carved the wood so beautifully? On the rickety stool was an old lamp, and even it, with its shade partly burned through, seemed to Yvonne a kind of miracle.

Her throat tightened. She might see him today. Why shouldn’t he bicycle down the street at two o’clock as he’d always done and glance up at her balcony? She didn’t know his name. She didn’t even know where he had been headed every day last summer when he rode past, staring up at her. For weeks she hadn’t met his gaze. She would catch sight of him, turning the corner onto their street—always between 1:50 and 2:05—his head bare, red hair ruffled by the breeze and his face open, handsome, easy. One arm dangled by his side and the other barely touched the handlebar. Instantly, she glanced down. She felt his eyes on her, felt the heat of his gaze the entire length of time it took for him to reach the end of the street—a one-minute ride that seemed to take hours—though she couldn’t have known in the beginning if he even noticed her. When he was right below the house, she saw a blur in her peripheral vision, that was all.

And then one day—her heart had been sore all morning, like something she’d swallowed the wrong way—she glanced out when he would be approaching the house and he was right below her, staring up. The next day she looked again. And then for days, weeks, she stared at him the whole length of his ride and he stared back, turning to look over his shoulder when he reached the end of the street. They were the happiest days of her life, of all her sixteen years, those two weeks when, for a minute or two every afternoon, she and the red-haired boy looked nakedly at each other.

Though she was starving, she couldn’t eat, and the feel of her bones pressing up through her skin thrilled her. Hip bones, clavicle, shoulder blades, jawbone: wherever her skin grew taut, she imagined his hand. The world was glazed with light and the Germans made no sound at all. I love you, she thought, watching him ride toward her. And even when he wasn’t there: I love you, I love you, I love you.

She heard his voice sometimes. When she was coming out of the bathroom, while she was waiting in line for food. It was deep and sudden and always a little too close. He’d speak more softly, she thought, if he knew it hurt her. Like sandpaper on an open sore. She hadn’t known that pleasure and fear were so alike.

But she was never afraid when she saw him. She stared right into his eyes, irises as blue as the early morning, and smiled at him.

And then one day, he stopped. He parked his bike in front of her house and called up. "Hello!" he said, his voice so much milder than she had imagined. He bowed. She stifled a laugh—beads of sweat were rolling down her sides—and called back, trembling: "Hello!"

That was the end of it: Oncle Henri burst through the front door, told the boy to stop gawking, went upstairs, and slapped Yvonne in full view of the street. She never met his gaze again, though for the rest of the summer she still stood on the balcony every day from 1:50 to 2:05, her mouth dry and her throat sore, staring at him. She prayed for him to look up, to see her suffering, to know that she loved him, but he looked straight ahead. The day before she went back to school at the end of the summer, she whistled a tune from childhood as soon as he appeared on the street, but he didn’t glance up. The whistle died in her throat and the only sound was the whisper of his tires on the pavement. And then, in front of the house, he paused. He climbed off his bicycle, slipped something under a rock, climbed back on, and vanished.

Excerpted from News of Our Loved Ones by Abigail DeWitt. Copyright © 2018 by Abigail DeWitt. Excerpted by permission of Harper. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.