“Yes,” Nina agreed, smiling at the two blond heads below, the black head, and the dark with its salting of gray. Maybe they weren’t Night Witches, they weren’t a regiment, but—“Is our team.”

She tore into the peanuts, wandering back down. Men on the field were running around again, people were on their feet shouting, who knew why. “Hit him with the bat!” Nina shouted, just to join in. Slid into her seat beside Ian, who had dropped his hat and pulled a paperback out from Nina’s bag: The Grand Sophy, by Georgette Heyer. “You stole my book again, Vanya,” Nina complained.

“Sophia Stanton-Lacy is being vexed by the spiteful Miss Wraxton, but I am confident she will prevail.” Ian removed a bookmark. “And since when am I Vanya? We’ve moved on from little ray of sunshine?”

“Ian—in Russian, would be Ivan. Proper nickname for Ivan is Vanya.”

“Nicknames are to shorten. You don’t shorten a three-letter name to a four-letter name to a five-letter name.”

“You do in Russian,” she said serenely.

He raised an eyebrow, studying her. “What are you thinking, comrade?”

“I think maybe we put off divorce for a year.” She’d been turning those words over for a while, not sure about them. She followed them up with a glare. “Only a year. Then maybe . . .”

“Then maybe,” he agreed, nonchalant. Englishmen, they couldn’t do nonchalant. Or maybe just her Englishman. He was fighting the grin that tugged at his lips, the grin she’d liked from the start even when she couldn’t understand a thing he was saying. It wasn’t much like the grin that had scrunched Yelena’s nose so sweetly, but there must have been something about it that was the same, because it had a similar effect on Nina’s stomach.

“A year,” he said again, as if he liked the sound of it. Nina liked it too. Not too confining, a year. It didn’t make her want to bristle and retreat. It wouldn’t stop her looking at a waning quarter moon and wanting Yelena back, missing her more than life—Nina didn’t think that would ever leave her. But she could bear it.

Nina took Ian’s panama and clapped it over her own head, tilting her face up to the sun, warmed through. “Tvoyu mat,” she said, blinking at the blue sky above. “Good flying weather.”