“I had been away at training for months but I wanted badly to see Maman, even though we just seem to bicker whenever we are together.”
“Even before I joined the SOE and couldn’t write anymore, it was clear from your letters that you and your mother weren’t getting on all that well.”
“I thought she’d be proud of me after I escaped France. I’d realized on my own what foods made me sick and I knew how to keep myself healthy. Instead, Maman just could not stop babying me. We were once so close, but after I joined her in London, all we did was fight. That last morning before I came here, I just wanted to share one easy conversation before I flew into the belly of the beast.”
Aunt Quinn’s house was quiet as I slipped inside that morning, but it was only half six, so I knew she and Maman might still be asleep. I pulled the door closed behind me just as there was movement in the hall, then turned around just in time to see my mother, half-asleep and wearing only a thin nightdress, coming out of Quinn’s bedroom. Her face was puffy with sleep. Her hair was wild.
I was so startled and confused I couldn’t quite join the dots at first. I knew Maman and Quinn sometimes stayed up late in the night on their visits—over the years I’d heard their footsteps on the hall, doors opening and closing. But to sleep in one another’s beds? Dressed like that?
I must have made a sound, because my mother spun toward me and our eyes locked. I would never forget the shame in her eyes, or the way the color drained from her face.
“Darling?” Quinn called from the bedroom, alarm in her voice. “Dru? What’s wrong?”
Maman and Quinn had always been so close, but it seemed I had failed to appreciate just how close.
“I didn’t handle it well,” I admitted to Noah now.
“Were you upset that they are…” He cleared his throat delicately. “…more than friends?”
“Not upset, but I was shocked. I was and am anxious for them—God only knows the hospital would not take kindly to two female doctors in a romantic relationship. But I know that Maman and Quinn love one another deeply and what form their love takes beyond closed doors is none of my business—I’m only glad they have each other. The problem isn’t that they are lovers. The problem is the lies, Noah. Why not just be honest with me at least once I became an adult? Why let me think for my whole life that Maman had to move to Paris because of me?”
“There may still have been some truth in that,” Noah offered gently.
I sighed impatiently.
“Perhaps a grain of truth. She did have to support me all on her own, but only because my father found out about her relationship with Quinn and blackmailed her. If Maman tried to insist that he give her money, he would tell the hospital what she and Quinn had been up to, and that would have ruined both of their careers.”
“Oh.”
Aunt Quinn had been a fixture in my life from my earliest memories, and the voice of reason when Maman and I were at war after my return to London, but I even managed to alienate her on that last, bitter morning before I boarded the plane for my mission. As we all sat together in a terse, awkward silence around the kitchen table, Quinn finally spoke.
“Your mother and I love one another, Josie. Try to understand. We never wanted to hurt you—”
“You’ve been lying to me for my entire life!” I choked. Maman made a sound of distress, and Quinn reached to squeeze her shoulder gently. “You both treat me like I’m still a child, even now! Don’t tell me you didn’t want to hurt me when you didn’t even trust me with the truth.”
“And this WAAF business you’ve been so busy with,” Quinn countered, her face hardening. That was the lie the SOE had me tell people—that I’d enlisted in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, and whenever I was away training or on mission, it was for them. “Have you told us the truth about that? Because I’ve never heard of any other WAAF recruit spending months away at training and returning tanned and covered in bruises and scrapes the way you do. And you’re back unannounced this morning. You’re here to say goodbye because you’re being deployed?” I nodded silently, and Aunt Quinn pursed her lips. “Let me guess, Josie. The ‘WAAF’ is sending you somewhere top secret and you can’t tell us a thing about your trip. Am I right?”
I was a hypocrite, and it seemed we all knew it. They had valid reasons for hiding their truth, just as I had valid reasons for hiding mine. But my emotions were running too high for me to be reasonable, and that’s exactly why I had to leave that morning. I felt so fragile that if we kept trying to hash it out, we’d end up screaming at one another, and I couldn’t leave for my first mission after a morning like that. I felt like a string pulled too taut already.
In time, we could all be honest—and maybe then, we’d finally understand one another. All we needed was some time.
“It must have been so different in your house?” I said, deflecting the conversation back to Noah because I knew I’d end up weeping if I kept talking.
“Oh, God yes,” he chuckled. “Five boys? It was madness, just chaos all the time. But I miss that, even now.” He paused for a long time before he added, “I want a family of my own, Josie. I want to settle down the minute the war ends. I want to move on and forget about all of this madness.”
He told me more about Geraldine, his first love, and how important she had been in his life.
“We met at a dance just after I enlisted,” he told me. “In lots of ways, she’s my perfect opposite—I like to listen, she likes to talk. I like to stay in, she likes to go out. I wilt plants just by looking at them, she has a green thumb.”
“Back when we were on the escape line, you seemed so certain you’d marry her,” I remarked.
“I was,” Noah said. “I might even have proposed by now except that my family was gone when I got back, and the grief seemed so heavy I wasn’t sure how I’d get out from under it. She helped me to breathe again, but then the SOE invited me to try out. I couldn’t tell Gerrie the details, obviously, but I did tell her I’d been invited to join the war effort in a way I couldn’t explain, and she made it very clear that she wasn’t willing to sit around waiting another year to find out if I was dead or alive. The thing is, the minute the SOE interviewed me, I knew I wouldn’t even ask her to wait. We argued at first.” He hesitated, then murmured. “I don’t think I ever told you this, Josie, but she was always jealous of you.”
“Of me?” I repeated, then I laughed softly. “That’s madness.”
“I was completely honest about you. I told her how much you helped me through that journey from Paris to London. I told her about our letters and even those visits we had back home,” he said quietly. We met up only once or twice after our return. Geraldine was out of town the time I went to Liverpool, and Noah came to see me when I was stuck in a rehabilitation hospital after surgery in 1942, but they’d already broken up by then because he was about to start SOE training. “It didn’t matter what I said. Gerrie was always convinced something more had happened between you and I.”