A lovely city, Grenoble: compact houses and pretty little churches, the lazy blue meandering of the rivers Drac and Isère, framed all around by the distant cloud-wrapped Alps. Another auberge, and Finn helped Eve up the stairs with the baggage, casting a glance back at me.

“I have to make a telephone call,” I said, and he probably thought I meant to my family. But the call I put through at the hotel desk, after a long wrangle with the French operator, wasn’t to the United States. It was to a china shop in Roubaix, whose name I fortunately remembered.

“Allo?” I’d only met her once, but I knew her voice immediately. I imagined her turning her head, spectacles reflecting the light.

“Violette Lameron,” I greeted her.

A long pause. “Who are you?”

“Charlotte St. Clair, madame. You saw me not long ago; I came into the shop with Eve Gardiner—Marguerite Le Fran?ois, as you knew her. Please don’t hang up.” Because she was on the verge; I could tell from the controlled rasp of breathing on the other end of the line.

“What do you want?” Her voice came noticeably colder. “I wouldn’t help that Judas bitch out of a burning house, so if it’s a favor for her—”

I fought down a swell of anger, the urge to snap that nothing was Eve’s fault. The urge to ask how well she would have held out against a glass of opium and ten broken fingers. But Violette was as invested in Eve’s guilt as Eve was herself, and nothing I could say would shift either of them. Only facts would do that, and for the facts, I needed Violette.

“Someone needs to look into the trial records where you and Eve and Lili were sentenced.” I lowered my voice, turning my back on the curious hotel clerk. “I believe there’s a lie hiding in there.”

I’d thought it from the first, hearing about the exchange of information that condemned Lili. Something there did not add up correctly. Solve for X.

Violette sounded rather contemptuous. “You’re just a little American. What could you possibly know about records for a European trial thirty years past?”

I could surmise a lot more than she thought. All those summers working in my father’s office specializing in international law: I’d indexed and notated French and German legal books, I’d filed trial paperwork, I’d heard my father expound over dinner as he compared European and American law . . . “The trial of three female spies in the heart of wartime would have been very well documented,” I told Violette. “You three were heroines, famous. German officers, French newspapers, Belgian clerks, English diplomats, all paying attention that day—everything about your trial would have been filed away, if only so it could be produced as proof of no wrongdoing later. If there’s a lie in there, it can be found—it’s just a matter of getting a look at the records. Will you help?”

“What lie?” Violette asked, curiosity sharpening her voice despite herself.

Got you, I thought. And told her.

An even longer silence fell. “Why ask me? You don’t know me, mademoiselle.”

“I know what you’re capable of, because Eve’s told me all about you. You won’t stop until you get the truth. I don’t know if the trial records are public or sealed after all this time, but if they’re sealed, I imagine you could get access much more easily than me. Because you were on trial that day, and you can argue your right to know the full story. And you don’t have the full story, you or Eve, because you didn’t hear all the deliberations.” I laid out a little honey, thinking it couldn’t hurt. “You’re a war heroine, Violette. Surely there are powerful people who still respect you, who owe you favors, who will pull strings for you. You’ll find a way to get the information if it’s there.”

“And if it is?”

“Just tell me. Tell me if I’m right. Please.”

She was silent so long I feared the connection had dropped. I stood there dry-mouthed at the desk. Please, I begged silently.

Violette sounded bemused when she spoke. But she sounded honed as well, as if the spy inside the respectable shopkeeper had opened her eyes for the first time in years. I didn’t think that part ever died, not in women like Eve and Violette. “Where would I contact you, Mademoiselle St. Clair, if I found anything?”

I promised to telephone her from Grasse tomorrow with the name of our hotel, and hung up feeling shaky. I’d cast a fishing line into the water; now all I could do was wait and see if anything came up on the other end. I wondered, going upstairs, if I should tell Eve what I’d done, but answered myself with a resounding No. She’d looked so fragile in the car, frail enough to crumble at the slightest blow. I wasn’t raising her hope about anything until I had something in hand to warrant it.

Entering the silence of my pretty little room, I flung open the shutters and looked out into the fast-falling twilight. Couples promenaded below, arm in arm, and I remembered Rose and me laughing about someday being old enough to go on double dates. I saw a tall blonde hand in hand with a laughing boy, but my memory didn’t stubbornly try to give her Rose’s face. She was just a girl, no one I knew. My hallucinatory flashes of seeing Rose everywhere I looked seemed to have stopped since Oradour-sur-Glane. Come back, I thought, looking at the throng. Come back, Rosie—but of course, she wasn’t coming back. Like my brother, she was dead.

A knock sounded. I thought it might be Eve, come to tell me what she had planned once we arrived in Grasse, but it was Finn. He looked different, and it took me a moment to put my finger on it. He’d shaved, put on a jacket (worn at the elbows but a handsome dark blue), and his shoes had been shined to a gleam.

“Come to dinner with me,” he said without preamble.

“I didn’t think Eve would come down to eat tonight. She looked like she wanted a whiskey supper.” Whatever got her to oblivion fastest. Knowing now how Lili had died and how it haunted her, I could understand that better.

“Gardiner’s done for the night.” Finn patted his pocket, jingling with Eve’s nightly haul of bullets. “It’ll just be us. Come to dinner with me, Charlie.”

Something in his tone made me straighten. From the way he’d dressed up, I didn’t think he meant one of our usual quick refueling stops at the nearest café. “Is this—is this a date?” I asked, keeping my hand from going to my mussed hair.

“Yes.” His eyes were steady. “It’s what a man does when he likes a lass. Puts on a jacket. Puts a shine on his shoes. Asks her to dinner.”

“I don’t know any men who do that. Not after we already . . .” I got a flash of what we’d done in the car last night, the windows fogged up and our breath coming ragged.

“Your trouble is, your experience is all with boys. Not men.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Is that the gray-bearded voice of wisdom, coming from a man not quite thirty?”