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

That evening, just before curfew, when the street was nearly dark, she slipped out and found his note. You are a bird.

That was all. She read it over and over and gave it a thousand meanings, seeing in the slope of his letters such declarations of love, such caresses, but that’s all it was, the four words, tu es un oiseau. The tu was everything, as if they’d already kissed, as if he had already cupped his hand around the back of her neck and pulled her toward him, pressed his lips against hers; as if she had already smelled him, felt the coolness of his body, the muscles of his hands, as if she had felt her teeth press against the inside of her lips as they did when she pressed her own palm to her mouth, imagining. The tu and the bird, that she was a bird, that he should say so, the knowledge of her so intimate. But what could she say in return? She stayed up late, composing a long letter in which she described not only the depth of her love but all the members of her family and the color of her room and her hatred of the Germans and all the things they would eat together, the two of them, when the war was over. The letter was seventeen pages long and it was three in the morning before she finished it and then she folded it up and put it in a notebook. She took a clean sheet of paper, wrote thank you, and, though it would kill Oncle Henri to know that she was violating curfew—putting them all at risk for her own purposes!—she slipped through the front door and left the note under the same rock where he had left his.

* * *

"Yvonne!" her mother called. "Are you still asleep?"

She closed her eyes and dozed a little.

"Yvonne!"

And then, because it was hopeless, they’d call her down no matter what now, she rose and opened her shutters and gasped at the freshness of the air, the smell of the salt, of the honeysuckle. It was not possible that the world could be so beautiful. It had rained while she slept, and the sky was still low and velvety, the color of smoke. She closed the curtains to dress and turned on the lamp: the walls turned crimson and the armoire glowed like roasting chestnuts—none of this was possible, she thought. She made up her bed, smoothing the violets on her bedspread with the flat of her palm and this, too—the bed, the motion of her own hand, seemed impossibly beautiful to her.

But Maman was waiting downstairs with a list of chores and Yvonne must hurry or be met already—so soon into her vacation—with her mother’s disapproval. (Because surely they wouldn’t call the girls back to school now? Surely this was the beginning of summer vacation. Either the Allies would come and there’d be too much fighting, or they wouldn’t and everyone would keep expecting them from day to day.) It was as if Maman turned to stone when she was displeased, her face suddenly cold and remote.

She hurried downstairs, hurried in the bathroom, and found her mother and Françoise at the table drinking their bowls of chicory. Oncle Henri was already weeding the garden and it struck Yvonne that, though she had wanted to stay in her room, though she loved her red walls and her armoire and had not wanted to be called down, even this—the long table, the bowls of foul liquid, her mother’s sagging face and Oncle Henri’s profile through the window—was more beautiful than she had ever realized. Françoise slurped her chicory, her long black braids falling down her back, her chair a little closer to Maman’s than it needed to be. She was fifteen, mostly fun—she laughed at Yvonne’s jokes—but she still clung to Maman, always standing slightly behind or next to her, pulling her chair closer to Maman than necessary; and Maman relied on Françoise as she never relied on Yvonne, asking her to fetch things, to unfasten the back of her dress, find the cream for her feet, even when Françoise had schoolwork to do.

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.