Mat looked to me.
I needed to be the one to answer. While I wasn’t sure, I felt I knew these women well and what was possible—even what was not. “No . . . Technically the information was all there. With tenacity and imagination, she might have guessed at the truth—a slim might—but Caro was asking a lot of her sister. There were natural misunderstandings between them . . . But she couldn’t have found her and saved her, if that’s what you’re asking. That was not possible.”
“‘O, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive,’” Dad said, quoting Walter Scott.
I held out a hand. “It wasn’t her fault. Caro’s or Margaret’s. That was Caro’s job and it was important, and in leaving her clues, she was trying to respect a vow of secrecy while sharing her life with her sister, the only way she could. Caro never could have anticipated the length and the pressures of the war or Margaret’s grief and the trauma of then losing their father only months later. Life simply carries misunderstandings along with consequences.”
Of anyone, I figured the three of us could understand that. Mom’s soft expression told me she did.
“And even if she had deduced any part of this, who was Margaret going to contact to confirm it?” Mat picked up my baton. “She knew nothing about the SOE. No one did, not then. Caro did the best she could to reveal herself, but she had no idea what Margaret was up against.” Mat turned to face my dad more fully. “Not only that, the final SOE files, including much of their work in France, weren’t declassified until 1998.”
“What about my dad? He was in the RAF. He had to know something about the intelligence world, the Old Boys Network, something. Couldn’t he have found the truth if he’d wanted?”
I thought back to the letters. While Caro loved her George, she protected him. She kept him at arm’s length, even broke up with him, to keep him from worry. Anger is better than worry, she’d told her sister on numerous occasions. It was Margaret she trusted. Margaret alone. I shook my head.
Dad sank back, his thoughts miles away.
No one spoke. We were waiting on him.
“Maybe it’s chauvinistic thinking, but we need to believe we can protect our families. It strikes very hard when we realize we cannot.”
Mom reached over and took my dad’s hand this time and squeezed. She didn’t let go.
I watched their hands for a moment, and a peace I had never known filled me. It was time to lay some things down—hurt, pain, blame, and grudges—and studying Mom, Dad, and even Mat, I knew it was time to pick other things up and hold them tight.
Mom rose to check on dinner.
Mat moved over to the dining table and started cutting and pasting large blocks of the pdf pages into a translation program.
Dad crossed the room to the window and waved his hand toward me, inviting me to join him.
Tears flooded his eyes. “Thank you, Caroline. I see things so differently now. And they are good, aren’t they? They can be good. They will be.” He chuckled softly.
“But . . .” I gestured to his face.
“Don’t mind me. They’re happy tears.” He swiped at his eyes. “They’re also tears for what might have been. But for you, all this could have gone another way. You could have quit when I asked, and I . . . I wasn’t headed anywhere good, was I?” He drew an arm around me, securing me close. “Yes, these are joyful tears . . . You have a beautiful name, by the way.”
I laughed at that, and was surprised I could do so without a tinge of sarcasm or cynicism warping the notes. “We haven’t been so sure about that these last twenty years, have we?”
His second arm reached out and I found myself tucked into a hug. Dad rested his chin on top of my head. “We are now.”
Forty
The next morning I found Mom already in the kitchen and Mat and Dad sitting together at the dining room table translating Caro’s records from German.
After dinner, Mat and I had walked them through our notebooks and pictures from both the British National Archives and the Paris Police Prefecture. It was a night of laughter, tears, and more closeness than I’d felt between the three of us in—well, in my entire life.
“We’re leaving soon after you today, darling.” Mom handed me a cup of coffee.
“Why? There’s no need for Berlin now.”
“We’re heading to Ravensbrück regardless. He needs to see it. Goodness, I need to see it. I love Caro almost as I loved Margaret. We need to do this for her, and for us.”
I leaned against the counter, watching Dad through the open doorway. “Is he going to be okay?”
Mom followed my gaze, a thoughtful and loving expression lighting her face. “He’s better than I’ve ever seen him. Can you feel it?” She peeked at me before returning her focus to Dad. “There’s been a weight on your dad as long as I’ve known him. This morning it’s gone. It is simply gone.”
“From last night?”
She lifted a shoulder. “I think it started at the graveyard in Crich. I’ve never seen him so angry as when he came to the house Wednesday. It was good.”
“Angry was good?”
The comment confused me as I’d felt myself shed the imponderable weight of far too much anger over the last couple days.
“Oh honey, after years of defeat masked as indifference, yes, the energy needed for a good shot of anger was very good to see. I think he might be ready to turn that energy to cancer now.”
Her words brought Jason’s text to mind . . .
If I have to pit him against you—so be it. You first. Cancer next.
As I sipped my coffee and parsed through the weight of anger, I recognized the energy it required, the energy it had taken from me. Mom was right. Jason was right. Dad had not been mild-mannered, deflated, indifferent, or absent so much as hurt. And I had not been seeking to please or to bring closeness over the years so much as reacting from anger.
Mat was right—we can change our perspective.
I pushed off the counter, pulled a second cup from the cupboard, and filled it with coffee. I headed to the dining room. Mat was no longer there. I found him in his bedroom packing his few things.
“Are you sure you shouldn’t go with them? This is huge for your family.”
“No.” I sank onto his bed. I smiled, still feeling that peace, along with the bright flash of something more I was hesitant to label—or, more accurately, hesitant to label alone. “My role is over. This is for my dad, and after all my mom went through with my grandmother, this is for her. I answered my questions and I need to show up for work today. Besides, they don’t need a chaperone.”
Mat raised a questioning brow.
“Call me a romantic, but they held hands more yesterday than throughout their whole marriage.”
Forty-One
I spent the eight-hour flight parsing legalese and researching how to open an official inquiry in England for Caroline Waite. Mat spent the eight-hour flight editing. And as our connecting flight from New York touched down in Boston, he submitted his article.