Winnie opened the trinket box she kept on her dresser and pulled out a small embossed business card. She was glad now that she hadn’t thrown it away, although she had considered it the night Schrödinger gave it to her, so angry with him for telling her terrible truths she could never un-know. That evening had set her down a dark path, but she could no more blame Schrödinger for that than she could blame James for disappearing, or Scott for caring that he had.
Winnie sat down at her little desk. She pulled out a sheet of her nicest stationery and her finest pen and began to write a letter. Three drafts later, she was pleased enough with the result to fold it up along with another sheet of paper, slip both into an airmail envelope, and address it to Schrödinger’s office in Ireland.
“Where are you off to?” Father asked as she stood poised near the front door, tightening the belt of her heavy wool coat. The weather had turned in the past week. Late fall was now feeling more like winter, and the first snow of the season was forecast for that evening.
“Just an errand,” Winnie said, “then I’m having dinner with Scott and Dora at the hospital.”
With Winnie spending so much time at the hospital, Dora had gotten it into her head to start volunteering there. The work really seemed to be something of a calling for her, and not just because Scott’s new roommate out of the intensive care wing was a dashing young man Dora was quite taken with.
Winnie knew it would be kind to invite Father to join her, but she didn’t want him accompanying her to the post office. She hadn’t told him about her plan to write to Schrödinger and knew he wouldn’t approve. Here, Hawthorn knew her as nothing more than a plain girl he’d once met at a party—if he remembered even that. She was well and thoroughly out of that mess. And Father wanted her to stay out.
He was probably right. Winnie would be better off focusing on the future, not the past, and there was certainly enough to occupy her, between her new relationship with Scott and the extra classes she was taking so she could graduate early and enter Barnard next fall. Winnie was sticking her neck out with no way of knowing it would make any difference, but after hours of agonized contemplation, she had finally decided she must try.
Schrödinger was famous. He was well-connected. He was, technically at least, her father. He was an outspoken opponent of the Nazi party, so he must at least have some scruples, even if they didn’t extend to his attitudes about seducing young students. And he was out of the country, safe from the reach of even military police. Perhaps he could help.
Even if it didn’t work, Winnie knew she had to try.
Winnie wished Father a good afternoon and headed out. The nearest post office was just a few blocks away, an easy walk even on a cold day. She tucked her chilly hands deep in her pockets, the right one clutching her letter tight, and headed south on Sutton Place.
Originally, Winnie hadn’t planned to do anything about Nightingale, uneasy as that made her. She could live with allowing Hawthorn’s work to continue, if it meant keeping Scott—and herself, and Father—safe. So, she resigned herself to being a coward. Or she had, until a conversation with Father the night before changed everything.
Scott had been asking about James again. Worrying about him again, because that was who Scott was. Even laid up in a hospital bed, he still had the energy to worry about someone else.
It killed Winnie to hear him talk about James, about how he would resume searching for his friend as soon as he was released, when she knew James was dead. Sitting there and nodding made her feel like the worst kind of liar, but she didn’t know if he was well enough for the truth.
So, she asked Father when he thought it would be safe to tell Scott that James was dead—much to his confusion.
That was how she discovered that, here, James’s body had never been dragged from the cold Hudson.
This didn’t necessarily mean James was alive. But, in that other world, Hawthorn hadn’t hidden James’s body when he died—he had been careful to dispose of the body in a way that practically guaranteed he would be found, and quickly. At first, Winnie had assumed it was a self-serving move on Hawthorn’s part—that the discovery of a dead, “drug-addicted” James was less likely to implicate him than a missing research assistant—but Hawthorn had, in his own twisted way, loved James. She wondered now if disposing of James’s body like that was a way to make sure he at least got a proper burial, and that his family was saved years of wondering.
Maybe James’s body was submerged in the river still, waiting to be discovered.
But maybe not.
Maybe, here, James was alive. Alive, but trapped. Still being experimented on by Hawthorn, just like Winnie would be if she hadn’t managed to escape.
Chances were slim, and on top of that, there was an even slimmer chance Schrödinger could help if James was alive—but if it were her in that Nightingale cage? She hoped someone would risk it.
Winnie paused outside the mailbox. The envelope in her hand didn’t just contain a letter. Inside, in her own careful script, was a tidy copy of the atomic bomb schematic. How could she send her father the lock, and not the key? She already had the perfect ransom to exchange for James. With that, Schrödinger could go over Hawthorn’s head, directly to the major general who Father had told her was overseeing both projects, and threaten to release the plan for the atomic bomb unless they searched Hawthorn’s personal labs for James and then shut the project down.
It was a risky gambit, to say the least. But Schrödinger had never shied away from infamy, and she was his daughter. Perhaps he would let her use up her lifetime’s worth of favors in one go.
What she was doing was treason—again—and Winnie did feel treasonous. And afraid. Not just of being caught, but of having the letter intercepted. It was an awful knowledge she was sending out into the world.
And for all she knew, she might be risking all this for a corpse decomposing at the bottom of the Hudson.
James wasn’t unlike Schrödinger’s cat now, both alive and dead until someone threatened Nightingale to find out for sure.
Winnie thought about Scott, in his hospital room across town. He would send the letter and the schematic, no hesitation.
Winnie weighed safety against cowardice, patriotism against governmental corruption, risk against reward. She thought about how Scott would never forgive her if he one day found out she’d had this chance and didn’t take it.
And she thought about the boy she’d met in that other world. How trapped he was, even while he was sitting across from her in that diner. Trapped, by habit and love and pride, just like she had been.
Winnie had freed herself from Father’s work. She wanted James to be free too.
She opened the mailbox and placed her letter inside.
She thought it was the right thing to do.
She hoped it was.