My phone beeped with a text.
Good afternoon from Ravensbrück. Soul-wrenching and healing. We needed to come. Going back tomorrow to search files in the information center. More soon. Love, Dad.
I held my phone to Mat sitting beside me. “I don’t think I have ever received a text from my dad and never a ‘love.’”
I pulled the phone back and stared at it. Only when the plane parked and everyone started moving about did I tap it off, still dazed by the wonder of it. I glanced to Mat, who again was gathering our bags from the overhead bins.
The wonder of it all.
There was one more thing to do. I tapped on my phone and texted my brother.
I’m back. Dinner tonight? I have so much to tell you.
His reply was instantaneous.
What??? Dinner? YES! Come to the house. I can’t wait to hear. Talked to Dad. He sounds great.
Mat dropped back into his seat. “What now?”
“If I’m lucky I’ll make that two o’clock staff meeting. Then . . . I’m going to return to Georgetown in the fall and finish my JD.”
“You are?”
“Yes. It was something you said about truth. Perspective and truth. That’s where I’ll find the tools to think through those questions and help in the ways I want to help.” I stared at him, inches away, willing him to understand. “But Boston is my home.”
“Good to know, but I don’t mind weekend visits to DC.”
I laid a soft kiss on his lips. “I’m glad.”
He closed the space between us for another, and a third, before the line to deplane shifted forward.
After we cleared customs, we each ordered Ubers—work for me, home for Mat.
Mine arrived first.
Mat held open the door for me and toggled his head to the Prius’s interior. I hesitated, on the edge of another precipice.
“You’d better get going . . . I’ll see you tonight. Dinner? My place?”
Relief flooded me. I hadn’t ventured ahead alone. “I can’t. I’m having family dinner at my brother’s.” Mat’s eyes clouded and I quickly covered his hand on the car’s door rim with my own. “Will you come with me?”
The clouds cleared. “Absolutely.”
With that, he kissed me hard. Not long and lingering, but that prolonged claiming kiss of someone in love and confident in that love. It was exciting, assuring, and held a delicious guarantee of more to come.
I dropped into the car and watched him through the window as it pulled into traffic. He never looked away. With a hand raised, he watched me go.
A tiny butterfly feeling of delightful anticipation fluttered through me. It expanded with each breath. To know someone’s heart, to want him like that, and to have him see you and reciprocate that desire—again I smiled.
The wonder of it all.
Epilogue
Even if you have no proof of something happening, it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Just this way . . .
17 October 1941
Staring at Christophe, it was Caro’s last conversation with Frank Nelson that filled her mind. She had made provisions, left instructions. And even if Nelson had accepted them with reluctance, he had accepted them.
“You aren’t serious. You can’t be,” Nelson had scoffed. “You’ll tie my hands. If Dalton sends this to your parents, if we let everyone believe this lie, you stop me from searching through open channels. You’re signing your death warrant.” He rattled the paper in front of her. “And this? Telling them you’re dead would be easier than this.”
She remembered how she had stepped her feet shoulder width apart as if bracing herself against that moment and all the tough ones to come—if the letter was sent, if something went wrong. “Dead means there’s no hope. My sister has clues and she’ll need the hope within them, even if there is nothing she can do.”
Caro pushed the paper back into his hands. “You said it yourself—if anyone knows who I am, who I really am . . . I’m too important.” She lifted a brow with her half smile.
They both knew it was true. Some realities are objective.
Nelson sighed, small, sad, and full of resignation. “I’m sorry I ever said that . . . We can do this without you.”
“Not the way the plan is structured, and our window is now. We can’t leave that factory operational one day longer.” Caro reached out and touched his shirtsleeve, right where his blue coat met the pristine white cuff. “You won’t find me anyway. I won’t be Rose. There are people who are made vulnerable if I’m linked to Rose Tremaine.”
“What alias did you choose?”
“One you’ll never guess, but someone will. If this goes poorly, the truth will emerge someday and no matter what happens, that’ll be enough.”
Now, gripped in Christophe’s beefy fist, she regretted all her mistakes. Christophe knew Caroline Waite. He knew Rose Tremaine. Her only hope was that, as of yet, he didn’t understand the implications, and the power, his knowledge held. If only she could get away . . .
Christophe dragged her across the courtyard. In the moonlight she could see the stubble on the back of his neck, his eyebrows growing together across his nose as he spun back to face her. The night was so clear she could see his nose hairs moving in and out with his breath.
“What? No lies to tell?” he growled at her.
She stepped back with her right foot and, twisting her body as Major-General Gubbins had taught her, she used her hips and Christophe’s vise-like hold on her arm as leverage to thrust the heel of her palm straight up and out. It connected with his face just beneath his nose. She heard the crunch of bone.
He moaned and released her, dropping to the pavement. As he folded, she grabbed his head in her hands and bent her leg. She cut her knee up into his head, just as she had done last June. The whimpering stopped as he flopped unconscious on the slick paving stones.
Caro grabbed her identification papers from her pocket and shredded them between her cold fingers as fast as she could, shoving the important bits into her mouth and scattering the useless edges along the street as she ran. She then reached into her other pocket and shredded the drawing of the Butterfly Dress. She grimaced. Tearing the embodiment of such delightful hope felt like a crime. But no one could see that. No one must ever connect her to Schiaparelli again.
One block. Two. She was four blocks from where she was to set the explosion, but it would have to do. Only eight blocks from the factory — yet to backtrack meant failure. She was already twenty minutes late.
Improvising, she lunged behind a car and set the charge beneath it. She struck a match. It failed and she willed her hands to stop shaking. Catching it the third time, she lit the fuse and ran.
One block and . . .
“Arrêtez.”
The voice was in front of her or she wouldn’t have stopped. Looking for an alternate path and finding none along the narrow street, she slipped and skidded to a stop in front of the officer.
“Mademoiselle Waite?”