“I think Kolb stays where he is tonight,” Nina said, also watching the doors.
Ian agreed. “Go home. No sense for us both to be bored here.”
“Isn’t boring.”
“Staring at a door? Draw comparisons all you like between flying bombing runs and tracking Nazis, but this kind of hunt involves a great deal more paperwork and waiting. I’m surprised you aren’t bored stiff. Or”—an idea struck him—“is it that you like having a team again? Not like your regiment of sestry, of course. But you have Tony and me, and we all share a target. Is that what you—”
She jerked her hand away from his, something black bolting through her eyes too fast for him to follow. “Am not your team,” she flung at him, every word like an ice bullet. “Is one hunt. One, only because of die J?gerin. We find her and is all finished. We divorce, I go home, is done.”
“It doesn’t have to be,” Ian heard himself say. “Even after we divorce, you can still stay on at the center, Nina. You work well with Tony and me; you enjoy it. I know you do. Why not stay on?” He realized how much he wanted that. Under her recklessness she had a navigator’s discipline and total dedication. And having a woman on the team, the places a woman could watch where a man couldn’t—“Stay with us after we catch Lorelei Vogt,” Ian urged, putting all the vehemence he could into the words. “Stay, Nina.”
“No team,” she repeated, eyes like stones, and stamped out of the diner.
Chapter 33
Jordan
June 1950
Boston
Garrett looked back and forth between the two prints lying on the darkroom table. “You’ve been working all week on two pictures?”
“I finally got them right.” A week’s worth of slaving in the darkroom: developing, enlarging, cropping, like as not scrapping and starting all over again. Two prints. But two prints to be proud of.
“Huh.” Garret looked back and forth between them. He’d come from the office, tall and pressed in a summer-weight suit. Jordan knew she looked like a complete wreck in comparison, hair tied up with a scrap of yarn, old shorts splashed with developer fluid. “They’re nice,” Garrett said, clearly hoping it was the right thing to say.
First a low-angle shot of her father in the workroom, holding up a silver card tray. She’d played with exposure and cropped the image till it showed just his hands, his forehead creased with concentration, the scrolled back of the tray, the outer edge of his smile. An Antiques Dealer at Work, she’d titled it with a quick pencil scrawl. “That’s the essence of Dad at work, but it’s also the essence of any antiques dealer at work. It’s why I cropped the image to show just a sliver of his face. It’s not just him; it’s anyone in that job.”
The second photograph was of Garrett at the airfield outside Boston, gesturing in front of the biplane. She’d cropped this image to its essence too; it wasn’t her fiancé looking handsome for the flash, but a pilot, any pilot, every pilot: a wedge of image that showed Garrett’s outward-stretching arm against the outward-stretching wing, Garrett’s grin as man and machine alike yearned for the air. A Pilot at Work.
“Very nice,” Garrett said again, looking lost.
Jordan looked at the two prints, for a moment wondering if she’d been wasting her time. You’re seeing things that aren’t there, the old critical voice scolded her, the one that told her not to dream wild things. But a cooler, more analytical voice said, They’re good.
“The photo-essay will be called Boston at Work. A series of fifteen or twenty portraits, all pared-down close-ups.” The idea had refined itself over the last week, since the evening on the balcony with Anneliese. What do you want? “I’m going to spend the entire summer on it.”
Garrett scratched his jaw. “What about the shop?”
“Dad’s old clerk Mrs. Weir offered after the funeral to come back to the shop if we needed help—Anneliese gave me leave to hire her full-time to replace me.” Jordan was already teeming with ideas. People doing their jobs all over Boston, just waiting to be photographed—the bakers at Mike’s Pastries in the North End, some pictorial slice of the flour and kneading fingers; Father Harris at Mass, the way his hands make a cradle as he elevates the host . . .
Garrett touched the biplane in the print of himself, looking wistful. “What’s it for?”
“My portfolio. I don’t have job experience yet, so I need solid work to show. I’m going to spend the summer photographing everything I can get my hands on.” Jordan took a deep breath. “This fall I’m going to New York, to try to get work as a photographer.”
“This fall?” Garrett looked puzzled. “But the wedding’s next spring.”
Jordan made herself look up, meet his eyes squarely. “I’d like to put the wedding off for a while.”
She braced herself, but his face cleared. “It’s just nerves,” he reassured her. “My mother says bridal nerves are completely natural. She wants you to come over soon and choose flowers. She said something about petunias, or maybe it was phlox—”
“I’m not ready for phlox, Garrett. I’m not ready to set a date. I’m not ready.” What a relief to say the words, not be forever squashing them down out of sight and out of mind. “I don’t want to be married yet. I want to work. I want to be a photographer. I want to find out if I’m any good at all—”
Jordan ran out of breath before she ran out of all the things she had only realized this week that she wanted so badly. To go to France and snap the Eiffel Tower even if it was the most clichéd photograph in the world. To learn what it was like to work on a deadline over burning eyes and cold coffee, because some yet-to-be-found editor wanted something done by eight sharp. She wanted colleagues to bump around a darkroom with, sharing cigarettes and ideas. She wanted to see her name on a byline: J. Bryde.
Garrett was looking lost now. “We have so many plans . . .”
“Plans can change. Come with me,” she said, linking her fingers through his. “Come to New York, have an adventure. Work for TWA instead of—”
“Come on, quit kidding.”
“I’m not. Do you even want to work with your dad at the office? You’re bored stiff there.”
Garrett tugged his hand free, crossing his arms over his chest. “Are you calling this engagement off?”
“No. I am saying we should postpone—”
“We’ve been together five years. Mom’s going to be heartbroken if we postpone again.”
Jordan felt bad about that, she truly did, but she stamped the feeling down ruthlessly. She was not going to get pushed down the aisle because of guilt. “We’re the ones getting married. Don’t you want to be sure before we say I do?”
“I’m sure.”
“Really?” Jordan paused. “You’ve never told me I love you.”
He looked confused. “Yes, I have.”
“When was the last time you looked me in the eyes and said I love you when we weren’t in bed and in the middle of—”
“Lower your voice!”
“We’re partway underground, there’s no way Anna can hear us.”
“And what’s she have to say about this?” Scowling.
“Absolutely nothing.” And what a glorious feeling that was. To make her own decisions, no input from adults who were absolutely certain they knew better than she did what to do with her life. “I’m getting an allowance, the same I’d have gotten if I went to college. And I have my own savings. I’ll rent an apartment—” Jordan broke off. Too many details for Garrett, who was looking angry again.
“You know something?” He jabbed a finger at her. “You’ve never said I love you either.”
Jordan leaned against the darkroom table, tracing its edge. Her pear-shaped diamond sparkled under the harsh lighting. “Were you faithful to me, Garrett?” she asked. “When you went off to war, you gave me your high school ring and made me promise not to go out with anyone else. Did you?”
He started to say something. Jordan raised her eyebrows. He cleared his throat.
“I didn’t go on a date with anyone else,” he mumbled.
She waited.
“But some of the guys, they said those of us who had come straight out of high school deserved a good time. So we wouldn’t . . .”
Get shipped overseas and die without ever getting laid, Jordan supplied silently. “That’s about what I thought.”
“It was just the one time . . . Okay, it was twice. But I thought you’d be mad, so—”
“I’m not mad.” Jordan sighed.
He brightened. “Really?”
“Garrett,” Jordan said gently, “isn’t it a problem that I don’t mind? If I loved you madly, wouldn’t I be a tiny bit hurt, or jealous, or something?”
Silence stretched.