Dad smiled with affection—and my breath caught in my throat.
“Run off with a Nazi?” I prompted, half joking, half testing. I wasn’t sure how much he’d read, how much he believed, and where we had landed on the lie his family carried for years.
“Pursued a good cause with courage,” he countered.
I felt myself nodding. Not in agreement, but in silent recognition that we’d gotten somewhere new. I bit the corner of my lip to keep myself from getting teary. When that didn’t do the trick, I widened my eyes to dry away the pricking sting. I was someplace I never thought I’d be and someplace I never wanted to leave—with my dad.
Reality overshadowed the warm glow within a few heartbeats.
“It’s over.” I shrugged. “We found what happened to Paul Arnim, the Gruppenführer mentioned in the note. He was shot by a fellow Nazi officer on October 17, 1941. But we didn’t find Rose—that was Caro’s alias. There was nothing about her at all, even though she was in Paris that night for an SOE operation. Did Mom tell you about that?”
“She did . . . So she really was a spy?”
“A British one, yes. Perhaps one of the very first. Mat and I believe she orchestrated the note to her family because she wanted the SOE clear of any backlash for letting her work with them.”
I leaned forward. “You see, those were early days and losing someone like Lord Eriska’s daughter could have ended the whole thing. So rather than put anyone at risk, we think she scripted that note. And whatever happened to her, she also scripted that, as well as she could.”
I sank into the soft leather as the search and the day drained away. “Nothing in the SOE files indicates they ever got a clue to her whereabouts. Her letters to Margaret imply she buried secrets within them . . . I’m sorry, Dad. We don’t know her as well as Margaret did. We can’t follow the clues. We’ve probably missed most of them.”
Dad pushed off his couch and joined me on mine. He sat close, angled toward me, his knee touching mine.
“Don’t be. Please. This is enough.”
“It’s not. I can’t give you the ending. I can’t make this right . . . You asked me to quit . . .”
He held my gaze within his own. “None of this . . . How we got here was never your fault or your responsibility.” He pulled me close. “You’ve carried so much.”
I squeezed my eyes shut.
“Believe it or not, I know how you feel.”
A small gargled laugh escaped. That I could believe.
“What hurts now is knowing I could have lifted that from you. If I’d been paying attention. That’s on me. So much of where we are is on me, Little One.”
Little One. My nickname from when I was very small—smaller and younger than when Amelia died, younger even than when I learned I’d been named after an aunt who died of polio at age seven. It was his name for me, back at our very beginning.
Our conversation soon wound down. Dad sensed my exhaustion and headed to the apartment’s far bedroom. He had generously left the master for me.
As I passed the second bedroom, I tapped on the door to say good night to Mat. He didn’t answer, but the door was cracked so I pushed it another few inches to peek inside.
Propped against pillows, laptop tipping onto the blanket, he was fast asleep. I crossed the room, lifted his laptop onto the dresser, and covered him with the throw blanket draped across the bed’s corner.
All that done, I couldn’t help doing one thing more. I leaned over and kissed his forehead. His hair came to a small widow’s peak at the center. “Sleep well,” I whispered.
I turned back at the door, partly to make sure I hadn’t woken him and partly just to see him again. Somehow, in a short amount of time, he had become deeply important to me.
Or maybe I was remembering he always had been.
“Good morning, Sleeping Beauty.”
Mat met me at the doorway to the kitchen with a cup of coffee. He was fully dressed and inordinately chipper for seven o’clock in the morning.
“How long have you been awake?” I reached for the cup he stretched my direction.
“A couple hours. How’d you sleep?”
“Surprisingly well.” I blinked, aware of our close proximity. We hovered together in the narrow doorway. “I came in and covered you with a blanket last night. I hope you don’t mind.”
“Not at all.” He mussed his hair with his free hand. The scar on his chin flashed in the morning light. “Thank you. I never woke till five.”
I tapped his scar. The gesture felt warm and intimate. I pulled back, again unsure if I’d overstepped and assumed. “Did you ever win?”
“Of course.” His hand grazed over mine as he reached to trace the scar himself. “After Luke gave me this, they were scared not to let me win sometimes.” His hand moved from his chin to my shoulder. His eyes morphed from the delight of feisty memories to tender concern. “Speaking of falling, how’s this shoulder today? The day after the day after is always the worst.”
“Not bad. Slightly sore.” The accident felt like a lifetime ago rather than two days. Those two days had changed everything.
I turned into the kitchen when something in our conversation nudged me. Spinning back, I bumped into him, a bit of coffee splashing on both of us. “What did you call me? Just now, when you handed me the coffee?”
“Sleeping Beauty?” Mat replied. He stared at me, first in question, then in wonder. “Sleeping Beauty.” He repeated the name as if it danced between us, just out of reach, out of memory.
“Sleeping Beauty.” I gave the name conviction, grounding it for us both. “Briar Rose . . . She picked her own nickname. When you said that last night about yours, it was like a trail I couldn’t follow. You picked your own nickname, just like C. S. Lewis, and just like Caro—Rose Tremaine. Caro even said she might do that. She wrote it.” I held my hand out to him in a wait here gesture, set my coffee on the counter, and ran for my phone and notebook.
Racing back to the kitchen, I leafed through the notebook. “She said she was glad about Margo Moo simply coming into being, but that . . . Here! Nanette Bellefeuille.”
I found the November 14, 1932, notes. “Claire insisted on role play for French lessons. Caro picked Nanette Bellefeuille, after her doll, and Margaret picked Bebe Dupont.”
I leaned against the counter. “It was all there. In the letters. The report noted it as well. Her papers were rolled.” I leafed through the notebook’s pages so fast, I tore the edge off one. “September 5, 1939, she wrote about rolling papers into the support panels of bras, like Martine used to hold up the Lobster Dress. Then again . . . papers . . . papers . . . There’s something else.”