“What happened?”

Nina told him, tersely. Hard to imagine his tough, swaggering Nina as a brokenhearted girl sobbing her eyes out in a cockpit. He would have hugged her, but she would hate that. “Do you know what became of her?” Ian asked over the sound of the waves. “Your Helen of Troy.”

“Yes,” said Nina.

Ian waited. His wife stared out over the black waves. “After the war, was a little time you still get letters to the Motherland. Before everything shuts down and the West is forbidden. Is still like floating messages in bottles, trying to find people. I don’t know where to find Yelenushka, but I find my old commander.”

“Bershanska?”

“Bershanskaia. Is a relief, knowing she lived. The regiment, they got all the way to Berlin!” A flash of fierce, momentary pride sounded in Nina’s voice. “Disbanded after, of course. No one wants little princesses in the air unless it’s war and you really need them.”

“Whoever decided that,” Ian said, trying to lighten Nina’s stony face and his own leaden heart, “can fuck themselves through seven gates whistling.”

Nina smiled briefly, but it faded. “I can’t write Bershanskaia as me, as Lieutenant N. B. Markova declared dead in Poland. I write as some cousin from Kiev now living in England, someone imaginary, and I put in details so Bershanskaia knows is me. I ask news of my sestry.” A long breath. “I get one letter back.”

The slow crash of waves, one, two, three. Rustle of fragrant vegetation overhead. Mangroves, maybe, Ian thought, stomach heavy as a stone.

“Bershanskaia lists the dead, ones who died after me.” Ian didn’t think that was a slip of the tongue; in a very real sense Lieutenant N. B. Markova had died in that funeral pyre she’d made of her plane in the wet woods of Poland. “My navigator, poor Galya, she makes it to the end of the war and dies in crash outside Berlin. Others too—many bad nights, at the end.”

Ian steeled himself. “Did your Yelena . . . ?”

“No. She lived.”

That startled him. The grief in Nina’s voice, he was certain her lover must have died.

“Hero of the Soviet Union, one of ten crews marching in Moscow Victory Parade on Air Force Day, June ’45. I imagine her marching through Red Square, flowers falling on her hair.” Another long silent moment; Nina seemed to have turned to ice. “Bershanskaia tells me she lives in Moscow, instructor pilot in civil aviation. She shares an apartment with navigator she had after me, Zoya. I always wonder, does she fall in love with Zoya? That bucktoothed suka has red hair, she’s a widow, she has two babies. Always Yelena wanted babies. She falls in love with one navigator, maybe now two?” Sigh. “Or maybe she’s just sharing apartment.”

“I imagine she thinks of you,” Ian said. “I can’t imagine anyone not thinking of you.” He had not one hope in the world now that his wife would stay with him. Astounding how much that hurt.

“Bershanskaia writes once,” Nina finished. “Wishes me well, finishes Don’t write again. Too dangerous, I know that. And soon there are no more letters allowed west to east, so doesn’t matter.” Pause. “I think Yelenushka’s alive, teaching boys to fly, playing with Zoya’s babies. Happy. Maybe is true. I won’t know.”

“What would you do,” Ian made himself ask, “if you saw her coming along this beach toward you?”

“Kiss her till she can’t breathe, ask her to stay. But she wouldn’t.”

“No?”

“She loves the Motherland, just enough more than me. Is all there is to say.” Nina looked at Ian. “I love her, I lose her. I don’t love anyone else. Is better.”

For who? Ian wanted to lash back. But he stamped the anger down, and under it the pain. There was a dark-eyed Moscow rose in a training cockpit somewhere behind the Iron Curtain, and against her he stood no chance.

“I wouldn’t have asked if I’d known,” he said at last. “I’m sorry.”

Nina nodded acknowledgment.

“I’ll begin divorce proceedings,” Ian went on, stripping his voice to a matter-of-fact flatness. “No sense waiting until this chase is over; it could drag on for months.”

Another nod. “Is best.”

Ian rose, shrugging into his clothes. Nina slid into her own. They didn’t say another word.

Chapter 47

Jordan

September 1950

Boston

Jordan hadn’t intended to go to the Scollay Square apartment at all. She’d been mindlessly walking the pathways on the Common all morning, forgetting her hat on a bench somewhere, gripping the Leica like a lifeline. Gripping her pocketbook too, where she’d hidden those long-ago photographs of Anneliese in the kitchen, Anneliese’s bouquet with its swastika, Anneliese with the man she said was her father, because Jordan didn’t dare leave them in the darkroom. Anneliese never came down to the darkroom, or she said she didn’t, but Jordan wasn’t sure of anything anymore. What did Anneliese really do all day? Jordan was appalled at the speculations that now prowled through her mind.

She’d managed to avoid facing her stepmother over the supper table the last few nights, claiming work. “If I’m going to New York so soon, I need to have everything ready—” and Anneliese was so warmly encouraging of anything that advanced that plan. “I’ll make you some cocoa to take down.” Jordan couldn’t work after that, just stare into the mug that Anneliese always topped with a dash of cinnamon, because she knew that was how Jordan liked it, and try to make sense of it all.

“Look at this logically, J. Bryde,” she had muttered aloud to the darkroom’s silence. “Step by step. And get it right this time.” She’d already gone down the path of suspicion before, after all, and it had blown up in her face. I am not doing that again.

So. An unexplained absence, not to Concord or New York but somewhere unknown. Maybe Anna went to meet a man, Jordan thought. If she has her eye on someone new, so soon after Dad, she would hide that from me. But a new suitor in her life didn’t account for that strange scene with Kolb. Some kind of fraud at the shop? There were all kinds of swindles that could take place in the antiques business; perhaps Kolb had dragged her into something unsavory. But I saw the look on his face; he’s terrified of her. He wouldn’t dare try to drag her into anything she didn’t want. Could Anneliese be the one who had initiated some shop swindle, and dragged Kolb along? What financial trouble could she have that would make her risk everything for a little extra cash? Risk the shop’s reputation, risk legal charges, risk Jordan’s father finding out?

Dad suspected, the cold thought whispered. He told you he had his doubts about Kolb, and right afterward—

But that thought stopped in its tracks, driving her out of the darkroom to walk the Common for the rest of the morning. Anneliese was with me when Dad left for that hunting trip, Jordan thought, aimlessly drifting toward the Common bandstand. She was with me all morning as I tried on wedding dresses.

That didn’t silence the cold voice. What a terrible thing suspicion was, once you let it have full rein. Jordan didn’t think she would ever be able to get this beast on a leash again, and she couldn’t avoid Anneliese forever, ducking supper and hiding in the morning behind a newspaper. Sooner or later, Anneliese was going to realize something was wrong.

And what are you going to do, J. Bryde? You can’t run to your father with your suspicions this time. Who are you going to tell? There’s no one but you.

Jordan realized she’d stopped by the pillared marble bandstand. Tony had kissed her here on their third date. She ran her hand along the marble, wishing for him viscerally—not to kiss, not to cling to, but to listen. No one listened like him; under all the grins and jokes he missed nothing.

Tell Tony.

She felt a reflexive cringe at the thought of unpacking this unsavory family business with an outsider—even a lover she trusted. But Jordan hesitated only a moment before letting her feet take her toward his apartment.

She squeezed past a pair of gangly young men sitting on the grimy stairwell passing a bottle back and forth, edging up the last set of steps to knock on the door. No one answered. She rattled the door handle again, and it came open; Tony had said it was flimsy. She hesitated. Normally she’d never have invited herself inside, but Tony had said Mr. Graham and his wife were out of town—and Jordan didn’t like the look of those men on the stairwell, talking too loudly as they passed their bottle. She went in and shut the door behind her. Tony wouldn’t mind.

The room was hot, the broken table heaped with papers and tea mugs. Jordan reached for the nearest piece of paper and fanned herself with it. Come home, she thought to Tony, looking at the clock. She very badly wanted to talk to him.