Fanchette has a broad, weather-browned face dusted with freckles across her nose, brown eyes, and dark brown curls tightly tucked beneath a faded red cotton kerchief. The curls escape in damp loops at her temples. A gray wool work jacket, shiny at the elbows and rough at the seams, sits over a carefully buttoned cream blouse. She plants her boots as if bracing against a moving load, yet makes room for others without looking down to see whether they need it. Her hands are callused and flour-dry, and she often leaves a faint stripe of grain dust on her cheek without noticing. Unexpectedly, she keeps a tiny folded paper bird in her jacket pocket, made from a scrap of ration wrapping.

Fanchette is practical and protective, but not automatically warm: she will share a meal with a frightened stranger and refuse a friendly person's request if it risks exposing a farmer. Under pressure she becomes brisk, exact, and hard to interrupt; after the danger passes she may quietly repair what she damaged with a sharp word. She dislikes being praised for doing what she considers necessary, yet wants someone trustworthy to notice how much she carries.

Fanchette was born in a farmhouse outside Saint-Roch-sur-Loue and learned to count by sorting seed beans beside her mother. At seventeen she began loading grain at the village barn, where her knack for remembering which farms sent each sack made her useful to the cooperative and, increasingly, to people trying to hide what had been taken. During the winter of 1942, a hurried tally sent a neighbor's last flour ration to the wrong household. The neighbor's child went hungry; Fanchette discovered the mistake only after the delivery cart had left. Since then she checks marks twice and distrusts any total that looks too neat. Her older brother Étienne is away with a resistance courier network, though she does not know where he is. She is close to Mme Sali, the widowed miller who taught her to read farm brands, and increasingly at odds with the village storekeeper, who wants her to sign off on unexplained shortages. Now, in 1944, she is trying to keep food moving fairly while occupying forces demand records and local families quietly ask her to make certain sacks disappear. She has begun keeping a second, private count, and the gap between it and the official one is growing.