CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

EVANGELINE

Were it not for Simone, none of it would have happened. She would have gone to work in the Vichy alliance; she would have bowed her head and avoided any attention the Nazis shot her way. Maybe she would have allowed Stefan to court her, maybe not, but it would not have been the same. She would have been nothing but a coward then, the coward Simone believed her to be—the coward she really was.

This wasn’t bravery, even now, that compelled her to go on. It was its own cowardice, the fear of Simone actually being right.

For Simone always saw through her, saw her skeletal structure of privilege and comfort and wealth. She had worked hard to make her way to the Sorbonne, it was true; but plenty of people worked hard; plenty of people were at least as smart as she was. Only they didn’t have the silver platter of the Gaturin name, the Gaturin money, the Gaturin comforts to serve up that hard work. Simone exposed her to the bone, revealed every last layer of who Evangeline really was. Evangeline hated it; she hated what she saw when at last she was able to look at herself through Simone’s eyes.

And yet, despite it all, Simone had loved her. For a time.

God, what was she doing? Was she risking countless lives just to prove Simone wrong? To run from the person she knew she really was? She was doing the right thing, the bold and stupid thing, true, the most that could be done by anyone in her position. But it was so minuscule; it was so, so late. Even in this pathetic act of resistance, she’d now been caught.

Georges-Yves had given Stefan everything he knew. The Resistance node locations. The radio frequencies. The codes.

Simone was in the dark of the forest now, stumbling blindly, no idea that the only lifeline she had was now compromised.

Evangeline stared around the darkening mansion, around her bedroom of silk and gold and brocade. Stefan’s men were almost certainly watching the house, waiting to see what her next move would be. He wanted her to rush straight to her radio set and try to warn the others in the network, implicating herself and them. He wanted to see her in action.

Well, Evangeline was well versed in the dangers of wanting too much.

She moved to the far corner of the upstairs sitting room and found the corner piece just beside the fireplace mantel. Simone’s work was so flawless that she doubted even the finest Nazi spy hunter could ever detect the faint dip and groove in the molding that Evangeline was now prying loose.

Deep in the bones of Château à Pont Allemagne, something clicked.

Evangeline rushed back to her bedroom and wrenched open the panel that had been unsealed. She pulled it all out—all of it. The cipher books, the transmissions she’d yet to make, the radio and Morse code communicator and signal booster and everything else, everything someone might possibly need to hang her for subversive acts against the occupying forces.

Evangeline’s hand brushed against the frame of the large panel, and she stared into it, into the space where once they’d huddled together, legs dangling out, arms intertwined, lips like bruises as they kissed and mouths like sacrament as they did more. And then she closed it. Perhaps for the last time.

She assembled her radio kit. Recalibrated her ciphers. Scratched out a few rough drafts of the million billion thoughts dancing around her head: the apologies, the pleas, the promises to do something meaningful. And then she sat down before her radio set and waited.

Waited.

It wasn’t too late. Not just yet. It wasn’t too late to pack it all away or smash the radio to bits or burn the cipher books. She was only listening in, the silence deafening now that Georges-Yves was gone. No matter how many Gestapo agents Stefan had set around the château, none could catch her if all she did was listen in. It was only when she began to transmit that her fate was sealed.

She crawled toward her bedroom window. Peered around the thick damask curtains, careful not to let them shift. Stefan’s men were surely listening for her to give herself away.

She dropped back down and gripped her face in her hands.

You will never understand what it’s like to be hungry, Simone had said. You will never know what it is to truly want. And without that need, then you will never have the courage to do what must be done. We fight because we have everything to gain. But you will never fight, because no matter how righteous your purpose, how just your cause—by fighting, you will only lose.

But she’d lost Simone all the same. Now, with one act, she would lose her country, her whole world. She did not need to be executed alongside the Resistance for France to die around her. She did not have to throw herself in front of a tank to feel the ache, that nagging tug, that told her she could have prevented all of this. She could stay locked inside this beautiful home, its bones built long ago by starving peasants and its floors swept by threadbare immigrants and its wood refurbished by a young Algerian woman that people spat on and called names—she could stay locked inside its comforts forever, but it would not take away the knowledge of the suffering and torment and hatred that continued beyond the seeded-glass windows. If she didn’t fight—there would be loss all the same.

She might as well do whatever she could.

The radio mumbled to life once more, beginning with the code name, long and short, as the operator identified themselves. Evangeline raised the volume just enough to hear it clearly.

CARPENTER.

Simone’s code name.

She bit down hard on her finger to keep from sobbing. Her other hand closed around the thing she had slipped from the pocket of Stefan’s coat, her fingers Magpie-quick. It was not too late. It was not too late to save her own life.

It was also not too late to save Simone’s.

Her fingers flew over the transmitter as she parceled out her response, their back and forth, all the gaps between the letters filled with things they could not say. The static on the line was heavy; Evangeline could almost imagine Stefan breathing into it, excited, delighted that he had caught her in the act. The Magpie. The mole within the requisitions office that had chipped away at the Wehrmacht, bit by bit.

Can arrange safe extraction after two hours, Evangeline told her. Her heart was a fist in her throat. No more.

They signed off.

Downstairs, so far away in the cavernous mansion she barely should have been able to hear it, Evangeline heard the front door splinter in its frame.