At last Peggy lifted her head from her hands, looking like she was swimming up through deep water, and said, “I’ll telephone Dilly, then inform Commander Denniston.” She reached for the message on Beth’s desk, giving Beth’s shoulder a fierce squeeze.

Someone else was looking at the schedule, calling out the girls who were on until midnight. “Beth, it’s your day off tomorrow. Go home before you drop.”

Beth struggled into her coat and stumbled outside, winter chill striking her in the face. It was full dark, but whether it was six o’clock or midnight, she had no idea. Beth’s ears were roaring as she came out of the stable yard, and it took her a fuddled moment to realize the roar wasn’t in her head—it was coming from the mansion. Men and women were spilling out the front door, shouting, laughing, calling out to each other. “You heard—” “I heard!” “About bloody time—”

“What?” Beth called, buffeted by the stream of ecstatic codebreakers. “What happened?” She caught sight of a familiar red-banded, slant-brimmed hat and caught Mab’s elbow. “What is it?”

Mab threw her arms around Beth, all her usual cool poise gone. “They’re in, Beth! The Americans are in the war! The Japanese attacked one of their bases—”

“They did?”

“Don’t tell me you missed that, too. Pearl Harbor?” Mab took a gulping breath. “The announcement was coming, we all knew it. Everybody’s been cramming into the mansion round the radio. Not an hour ago President Roosevelt came on, and the Yanks are in it!”

America in the war, and the Spy Enigma broken—after so many months of hoping and waiting for both, they’d come all at once. Beth took a shaky breath and began sobbing. She stood there with tears pouring down her face, utterly spent and utterly, utterly happy.

Mab put an arm around her shoulder and squeezed, a flash of light from the mansion sparking red fire off her ruby ring. “Cry all you want, I won’t tell. Have you got a day off tomorrow, like Os and me? We all need to sleep late . . .”

By the time Beth had cried herself into hiccupping silence against Mab’s shoulder, she was limp as a dishrag and Osla had found them. “Darlings, isn’t it topping!” She and Mab steered Beth between them as they headed for home, chattering excitedly. The world was coming back to Beth’s eyes in its usual shapes by the time they came through the Finch door, and as she unbuttoned her coat, she called eagerly, “Did you hear, Dad? Have you got the radio on?”

“We heard.” Beth’s father came into the corridor smiling. “Lovely news, lovely—the war will be over in no time! Mabel, your fiancé telephoned. He’s back from America earlier than expected.”

Mab paled. “My God, did he sail in the middle of—”

“No, he was back day before yesterday. Said he was quite as surprised by Pearl Harbor as we were. He’s at his London digs if you want to ring.” Beth’s father smiled indulgently as Mab flew for the telephone, but that smile shuttered as he looked back at Beth. “Your mother’s in the kitchen. She’s had a very difficult day—”

Beth kissed her father’s cheek, blew into the kitchen, and flung her arms around her mother’s waist where she stood at the stove. “Isn’t it wonderful news? Let me take over, I know I’ve been gone forever, you wouldn’t believe the workload.” The exhaustion and frustration of the past months were fading like a dream. The first message had been broken; they’d break more. I can break anything, Beth thought, smiling. Give me a pencil and a crib, and I’ll crack the world.

She reached for an apron, looking around. “Where’s Boots?” She was hours overdue to take him out.

“Do set the table.” Her mother kept stirring. “Yes, it’s lovely news. Though when I think of those poor people in Pearl Harbor—”

“Let me take Boots out, then I’ll set the table.” Beth whistled, but no woolly gray shape trundled crossly into the room.

“I told you, Bethan.” Her mother looked up from the pot she was stirring, her smile serene. “I told you that dog was out if it ever made a mess in the house. You said you’d always be home to take it out. I told you—”

Beth took a step, suddenly numb. “What did you do?”

“BOOTS!”

Beth caught her foot on a stone, stumbling. Bletchley after sundown was a black pit, every chink of light battened down. She had a torch but it was pasted over with regulation paper so only a shadowy beam emerged. A village she’d walked her entire life suddenly became an alien landscape.

“Boots!”

Her dog had made a puddle in the parlor when Beth was late coming home. And her mother had taken him by the collar, put him outside into the dark street, and shut the door.

“Now, Beth,” her father had said, placating. “See it from your mother’s side—” But Beth had grabbed the torch and run straight out into the street, forgetting everything except that her dog was blundering through the winter night alone.

She stumbled again, filling her lungs in a hitching sob. “Boots!”

A chink of light showed down the street as a door opened. The indistinct ripple of Osla’s voice: “Pardon me, have you seen . . .” Mab had the other torch, looking in the opposite direction. They’d followed Beth without a moment’s hesitation, as Beth’s mother stood with arms folded, shaking her head more in sorrow than in anger. “I told you what would happen, Bethan. You can’t blame me.”

Yes, I can, Beth thought. But she couldn’t focus on the flickering rage; despair welled up over it. How was she going to find one small dog in the middle of the night? He was gone, the longed-for dog she’d claimed in the most monumental act of will of her life. He was gone and she was never going to find him. Or if she did it would only be his body, half-eaten by foxes or crushed by a car careening through on the way to London . . .

She screamed into the dark, ripping the paper off the torch. “Boots!”

“Beth!” Mab’s voice. Beth reversed, stumbled toward the bouncing beam of Mab’s torch, heart suddenly cannoning inside her ribs. Mab’s tall shape formed up in the black, clutching a small, shivering bundle.

“Found him under a bush four houses down,” Mab said. “He didn’t go far—stop snapping at me, you little bugger, I’m on your side.”

Beth pulled her dog into her arms and for the second time that day sobbed all over Mab’s shoulder. The schnauzer was damp and smelly and quivering with cold, harrumphing like a cross old man when she hugged him too hard. Beth didn’t know if she’d ever be able to put him down.

“There’d better be a good reason you girls are making a ruckus,” a disapproving voice sounded. One of the civilian ARP wardens, busybodies all. “Uncovered lights despite blackout regulations . . .”

Mab switched her torch off and Osla caught up and began pouring verbal honey. They got rid of him and turned for home, steering Beth between them. With Boots safe, a hot spark of something diamond-hard had lodged itself in Beth’s throat, and with every step toward her house, it grew bigger.

“Is your mother going to let you—” Osla began, and then stopped.

Beth came through the door, tugged her mother’s jumper off the coatrack, and rubbed Boots dry right there in the entryway. She could see Mrs. Finch’s shoes on the hooked rug but refused to look up. Osla and Mab crowded in behind, making bright noises about how cold it was outside, but the silence under their exclamations stretched like a sheet of ice. Beth didn’t raise her eyes until Boots was dry and had stopped shivering. Then she straightened, meeting her mother’s gaze expressionlessly.

Mrs. Finch heaved a gentle, put-upon sigh. “It can stay one more night, Bethan. If tomorrow you find it somewhere else to—”

Beth didn’t plan it, didn’t think about it, didn’t even know it was happening until she saw her hand flash up and hit her mother across the face.

She’d never hit anyone before in her life. She’d probably hurt her hand more than she’d hurt its target. But Mrs. Finch fell back, fingertips flying to her own cheek in shock, and Beth fell back a step too in horror. I didn’t mean to, she almost said—but she had meant to. I’m sorry, she almost said—but she wasn’t sorry. The diamond spark of rage in her throat was still burning, larger and larger.

She couldn’t think what to say, so all she said was, “How dare you?”

Red-faced, Mrs. Finch reached for her Bible. “‘He that smiteth his father or his mother shall surely—’”

Beth didn’t wait for her to finish Exodus 21:15 or extend the book and tell her to hold it up until her arms burned. “No.”

“What did you say to me?”

Out of sheer habit, Beth almost dropped her eyes and fiddled with the end of her plait. But when her fingers reached for the wispy end of the long braid, which she’d spent her whole life hanging on to like a lifeline rather than meet anyone’s eyes, it wasn’t there. She had a smart shoulder-skimming wave now, and she had a dog and a circle of friends and a job breaking German ciphers.

So Beth said very quietly, “I’m not holding the Bible up for the next half hour while you harangue me. And you are not throwing my dog out.”