“Are you okay?” she asked. She sounded tired too, weary and heavy in a way I’d not seen in her even during our training.
“Of course,” I said, blinking the tears quickly away. “Just tired. How long have you been here?”
“I only arrived yesterday. And you? Madame Célestine didn’t mention you were coming…”
“I’m a few days early,” I said. A vital doctrine of our field operations was that agents should avoid prolonged contact unless it was strictly necessary to the mission, so I suspected that the overlap of our stays at Célestine’s house would not be tolerated for long.
I removed the awful modifiers from my cheeks then took the hat off, too, and shook out my hair. All day I’d been thinking only about bathing and changing my clothes, lying flat to stretch out my spine, but now that Chloe was here, the urgency of all of that seemed to ease.
“Sit! Rest!” she insisted, as she took the hat from my hands and set it gingerly on a nearby sofa. I left Rouen in such a rush I only packed the most essential items of my clothing, and had just one suitcase and the leather shoulder bag with me. Chloe took these from my hands and rested them on the chair beside the hat. “I’m guessing you’ll want some tea.”
“No, I definitely need something stronger today,” I laughed weakly, but I let her guide me to an armchair, and I sighed with pleasure as I sank into it.
“I’m going to go tell Célestine you’re here and to fetch us some drinks. And then… I guess we can swap notes about our first real-world missions?”
“Mine is still very much active,” I said reluctantly. “I’m not sure how much I should say.”
“Understood. I’ll be back soon.”
We swapped as much information as we dared divulge that night. I told her I’d been in the Normandy region on reconnaissance.
“I had some hairy moments,” I admitted, flicking her a glance. “I owe you a favor, actually.”
“You do?” she said, bemused.
“Let’s go somewhere lovely together,” I said softly, and her eyes widened in surprise. “I used that trick you taught me for staying calm more than once. Thank you for sharing it with me.”
“I’m so pleased you found it useful,” she said. “My Maman would be proud if she knew.”
She told me, in much greater detail, about months at Montbeliard, the destruction of the factory there, the exposure of their w/t operator. We tumbled into bed late and I thought I’d sleep like a log, but as the grandfather clock in the hall outside counted down the hours to midnight, I was still wide awake, repeating key facts from the mission to myself over and over again, a memory trick I’d learned to keep track of so much information I could not afford to write down.
In the early hours, I started to think about Giles. I remembered the very moment we met—that charming smile he offered me on his first day of his pilot’s course at the Hatfield flight school. I’d been in England for eighteen months by then and had just won a civilian position with the Elementary and Reserve Flying Training School.
We talked every day over the two months of his course—sometimes he’d sit at my desk and distract me for hours after he finished his training. I didn’t mistake the way his eyes would linger on mine or the faint flush on his cheeks when I smiled at him. He was shy—but not so shy that he wouldn’t talk to me. And even after all of those weeks, he’d never asked me out. I couldn’t make sense of it and as his course was ending, I’d run out of patience and time.
“Well?” I said impatiently, when he walked past me on his final day at Hatfield flight school, giving only a polite nod.
“Well, what?” he asked, turning back to me in alarm.
“Are you going to ask me out, or not?”
“Do you…do you want me to?” he said. He seemed shocked by this.
“Only if you want to!” I exclaimed. He paused, staring at me quizzically, and I deflated. “Giles, I don’t understand. You seem to like me, but you’ve made no move to ask me out.”
“I wasn’t sure if my feelings were reciprocated,” he said, raising his chin proudly. “I thought it better to be left wondering than to inadvertently cause offense.”
It was a whirlwind courtship and we were married within six months. Pushing Giles to ask me out was the single best decision I had ever made. The depth of grief I felt at his loss was a testament only to the depth of love I felt for him in life.
And then there was Hughie—the piece of our family we didn’t even know was missing.
During my mission, I had blocked most thoughts of my homecoming from my mind. I could not afford to lose focus when I was in Rouen, and the idea of reuniting with my son and even my mother tended to leave me impatient and anxious. But now that I was relatively safe in Paris, I let myself imagine that moment for the first time—how it would feel to open the door to my apartment and to see them both there, safe and well and no doubt overjoyed to have me home.
Counting the weeks of preparation with Basile at Baker Street, I had been away from Hughie for the better part of six weeks this time. We’d endured long separations during my training so I knew to expect a little hesitance from him at first, but within an hour or so he’d be smothering me with hugs and messy kisses.
It was that thought that tripped me up.
The tears came unbidden and I was too exhausted to resist so I let them run down my face and into my pillow. I loved my son. I loved every little thing about him—from his desperate curiosity about the world to those beautiful blue eyes. I had tried, in the beginning, to speak to him in both English and French so that he might be bilingual but he had taken to French so much more quickly than English. I loved the way he would babble at me in my mother tongue. I could not wait to hear his little voice call “Maman!” again.
“Are you okay?” Chloe asked, her voice thick with sleep from the other side of the room. My face flushed with embarrassment, and I sniffed and rolled toward the wall.
“Sorry. I’m fine.”
“If you need anything—”
“I don’t.”
I spoke more sharply than I intended to, but Chloe’s breathing deepened again within minutes, and she was back to sleep.
“Can I ask you something?” Chloe said. It was midmorning the next day and we were sitting at Madame Célestine’s table sharing yet another cup of tea. Her home was lovely, but both Chloe and I were at loose ends waiting for the next phase of our deployment, and neither one of us was accustomed to having free time. “You have a family at home, don’t you? You don’t have to tell me the details,” she added quickly at my surprised look. “It’s just that when we first went for training, I noticed you had a tan line on your ring finger. And you’ve never mentioned any names but…” She cleared her throat. “Sometimes you toss and turn in your sleep. I think you might cry in your sleep sometimes too.”
“My husband is gone,” I said. It was against the rules to tell her anything at all about my personal life—but I could see no harm in telling her this much. As the words left my mouth, a memory flashed before my eyes. He was home on leave the last time I saw him. I had finally adjusted to the shock of finding myself pregnant after his previous visit home. Giles could not stop touching my belly. He kept telling me how beautiful I was—how excited he was that we were going to be parents.