“Welcome to Honeysuckle, Aunt Vivian. I’m awfully sorry to turn up like this. Had a work session that went late.”
“So I see. Vivian will do.” She squinted at his face. “I hope you don’t mind my saying so, but you look as if you wouldn’t mind a cup of coffee.”
He smiled, and for a moment he was like the old Sasha, hair swinging down onto his forehead, the bluest eyes you ever saw. “I’d be grateful,” he said.
After he’d drunk two cups of coffee, wolfed down half a dozen eggs on toast, and charmed the children, Sasha headed upstairs to bathe and change. Iris followed him. He spotted her in the mirror above his dresser while he unbuttoned his shirt.
“Go ahead. Deliver the lecture. I deserve it.”
“Where were you? That’s all I want to know.”
“Out. With friends. That’s all you need to know.”
“I was worried.”
“Were you?” He tossed the shirt in the hamper and stripped off his undershirt, his drawers. “I figured Beauchamp would be keeping you company.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing.” He started out the door to the bathroom, where the water was already running into the tub, nice and warm.
“You can’t go out in the hall like that! The girls!”
He swore and snatched a dressing gown from the hook. Iris sat on the bed and put her face in her hands. She heard the opening and closing of the bedroom door and lay back across the bed to stare at the simple plaster ceiling. Outside the window, the children played some noisy game on the lawn, and Iris marveled at how easily they’d come together, these cousins who didn’t even know each other—how deep and instinctive is the human need for connection.
She lay there for some time, even though duty tugged her downstairs. She felt paralyzed, unable to move, let alone rise and do all the mothering things. She couldn’t confront Sasha about Nedda Fischer, because she’d have to tell him how she came to see the photograph in the desk. She wasn’t even sure she wanted to. What was the point?
The door creaked open. Sasha’s voice, a touch ironic—Still here?
“Tell me about Zurich,” she said.
He moved to the dresser. “Zurich? Why Zurich?”
“You weren’t just working for the embassy, were you?”
“No. I was seconded to the OSS, under diplomatic cover. Liaising with our agents in Germany. Assisting the escape lines, that kind of thing. I assumed you knew.”
She sat up. “How should I know if you didn’t tell me anything?”
“Because you couldn’t possibly think I’d spend the war stamping passports, for one thing.” He had a towel wrapped around his middle. His cheeks were pink and smooth; his hair combed back wet from his forehead. He took a cigarette from the pack on the dresser and lit up. “For another thing, I wasn’t exactly home every evening at five o’clock, was I?”
“You were so happy in Zurich. I always wondered why.”
“Because I was doing something worthwhile. Fighting the right side.”
“Is that all?”
He sucked on the cigarette. “And I had you. And Kip. What more could a man ask for?”
“It’s funny, because I was miserable in Zurich. I had all those miscarriages, and you were hardly ever home, and the war was going badly.”
He stared at her a moment and turned to the window, where the children screamed around the lawn. “All’s well that ends well, I guess. We ended up with Jack, didn’t we, and we won the war. And now you’ve got me around all the time, a nice well-trained husband.”
“No, you’re not. You’re a drunken, irritable, unreliable husband who’s probably having an affair.”
Sasha spun around. “What the devil? Who’s having an affair?”
“With that blond woman. Fischer. She keeps popping up, doesn’t she?”
“Damn it, Iris. I told you, it was over long ago with her. I—”
He bit off the sentence cleanly, like the snip of a pair of scissors. Iris stared back at him. She took in the instant of panic, the flexing around the eyes, replaced almost—but not quite—immediately with a look of bored irritation that was the screen for something else, the search for something to say.
“You’re talking nonsense,” he said.
“She’s your contact. Your handler.” Iris spoke slowly, because it was so much to understand—everything—the history of the past eight years—of her marriage, of Sasha—all rewriting itself inside her head.