Her daughters would be home soon.
Augusta stared at the box delivered by Herc Huckley’s son. It sat on the middle of her bed. Its lid still in place.
She couldn’t keep it in the closet behind the quilts. It seemed to be pounding like the heart hidden under the floorboards in that Poe story.
But she couldn’t quite open it either. She remembered all the things she’d given up, and all the things she’d gotten because of her chance encounter with Nick Flemming.
After the night of the snowstorm, Augusta broke things off with Max Stern, sitting side by side on a sofa in his mother’s living room. She opted for the version of her speech that was less treatise and more a gentle letting-down. He didn’t seem to mind being let down. In fact, she thought that Max might have even admired her a little. He said, “Well, that’s okay. I think a girl like you’s got bigger fish to fry.”
She assured him that she simply wasn’t ready to settle down. Max surely was. Within three months, Augusta read his engagement announcement in the newspaper.
Later, on the phone, her mother said, “One day you’ll be tired of that office and you’ll wish you were home in a house paid for by a dentist.”
Her father, on the other hand, liked the idea of an old maid. “You’ll take care of us when we’re old.”
She had no intention of doing this. In fact, after the breakup she felt relief that she wasn’t going to have to take care of Max Stern, as her mother had done for her father.
She didn’t want to tell her parents that she was dating a law student. She knew the relationship wouldn’t last. Why get her parents’ hopes up?
One night walking home from seeing West Side Story for the third time, she told Nick what she thought of marriage.
“Interesting on a philosophical level,” Nick said. “But I still don’t know what you think about marrying me.”
She loved him. He made her ache. She wanted to spend her life with him. But still, hadn’t her parents been in love once? She said, “Are you proposing?”
“Should I?”
After that, he did propose a number of times, but never very seriously. Once she had whipped cream on her nose and as he wiped it off with his finger, he said, “I want to marry you, Augusta Rockwell.”
Another time, he curled to her back and whispered into her hair, “I want to take you for my wife,” as he was falling asleep. It reminded her of the old nursery rhyme “The Farmer in the Dell,” where the farmer takes a wife, the farmer takes a wife, hi-ho the darrio the farmer takes a wife.
Was he serious? No, she couldn’t let herself believe that he was. They didn’t have sex, but it was all so passionate that she had to assume this wasn’t a confession as much as just getting caught up in the lustfulness of it all. Although she feared sex might burden her heart—rheumatically and romantically, she’d wanted to give in. It was Nick who said they should stop. In retrospect, she realized that he might have already been recruited.
In fact, when he talked her out of having sex with him that summer, it was an ending, though she wouldn’t see that for a long time.
He was living in a large rooming house that he and his friends had rented out together. It had a shabby clay tennis court and leafy pool that they didn’t know how to take care of. It had been a near-mansion at some point and now it was a rental—cheap, when split among them.
She remembered it all vividly. Herc had been the one to answer the door when she knocked. He told her to come in and get out of the heat. The old house was airy, shadowed, and cool with a wealthy dampness.
The drunken meetings of The Amateur Assassins Club were held in the dining room and weren’t secret at all. In fact, the club was a point of pride. People who walked into the old house were often asked to add a target name to the list. There were great late-night drunken arguments about the best means to get in close. For patriotic reasons, there were a lot of communists on the list, but overall it wasn’t personal.
As Herc took her through the dining room to the backyard where he’d last seen Nick, she passed the corkboard with magazine clippings of a few famous foreign dignitaries stuck to it. Augusta noticed that someone had added a clipping of a downtown bank.
“What’s this?” she said.
“Nick’s gotten bored. He wants to include fake bank robberies,” Herc told her. “He wants to make two teams. Each would case the banks, work out the details of the perfect heist, present them to the group as a whole. The one with the best chance of success would win. We’d get a panel of judges. Do you want in? You seem practical and, I don’t know, more like one of us or something, not like some of the other girls.”
It was supposed to be a compliment. She knew what he meant; Augusta had never really hit it off with women. She usually just didn’t know what stories to tell and when. She’d say something and the other women would stare at her. She wasn’t sure if it was her timing or her content, but she was always slightly off. “You’d have to change your name—The Amateur Assassins and Bank Robbers Club.”
“Pisky’s saying no to the whole thing so I don’t know if it’ll happen.” Joel Abbington was nicknamed Pisky because his father was an Episcopalian minister who came from family money and was the one who bankrolled their parties. “He thinks bank robberies are classless. He wants to go into high art theft, if anything.”
“I see.”
“Anyway, some of us have to study.” Herc wasn’t as smart as the others—or at least didn’t seem to think he was. He took everything more seriously.
He opened the back door. Nick was bent over a hose, untangling it to water the courts. “Nick!” Herc called out.
Nick looked up, saw Augusta, and waved.
Augusta’s stomach flitted. She tried to smile. She’d shown up, having made the decision to give herself to him wholly.
Herc ducked back into the house. Nick was wearing shorts and tennis shoes. She’d worried over whether to wear Bermuda shorts or a dress. She’d opted for the dress and now it felt too formal. He said, “Tennis later?” They’d never played together before. “I bet you have a vicious serve.”
She walked to him quickly. “Let’s go to your room.”
He straightened up. “What was that?”
She smiled.
They scuttled up the butler’s stairs to his room. But as he started to kiss her and then fumble with the buttons on her dress, he stopped abruptly, like a voice had shouted at him in his own head.
Already a little breathless, they lay together in the bed, still dressed. He said all the right things. “We’ll get married first. I’ll finish up as fast as I can here. We’ll get a little place. A walk-up. Maybe out in Alexandria. I’ll meet your parents. You’ll meet mine—a little uptight but they’ll be relieved to see me settle down. We’ll have a wedding, something small…We’ll start a family.”
And she said, “This is what marriage is about, really. Not love, but family.”
“It’s about love,” he said. “I love you.”
She wasn’t her mother. He wasn’t her father. They would become a family. They could get married and still be who they were, still love each other.
But a few days later, they were supposed to meet at a little restaurant near her office just after work. And he never showed up.
As she was paying the bill at the counter, Herc Huckley appeared. He was pink from having hurried there. He wiped his forehead with a hankie that he tucked into his back pocket.
“Herc,” she said quickly, “is Nick okay?” She was afraid he’d come to deliver some tragic news.
“He’s gone.”
She spread her hand on the glass countertop. “Dead?”
Herc reached out and touched her elbow. “No, no. He left.”
“What do you mean?” She started to feel a very new kind of anger.
“He packed up. Nothing’s left.”
“Why are you here then?” The anger made her feel incredibly powerful.
“He left me a note. He told me to come here and tell you.”
“Tell me what?”
Herc looked around the small lunchroom—bustling waiters, people talking, eating, the clinking of silverware and glasses, all of it doubled by a bank of mirrors on one side. “He wanted me to…”
“Look, Herc. Forget it.” She folded her receipt and tucked it in her change purse, snapping it shut. “You’re not his errand boy.” She walked out of the restaurant then. Her eyes stung from the sidewalk’s bright glare. She was furious. She worried she might throw up. She smoothed the tight fit of her dress against her ribs.
Herc was there at her side again. “But maybe you shouldn’t take it too personally. I mean, he abandoned everything important to him.”
“This is more personal than you can imagine.”
“He got a call.”
“From whom?”
“One of the biggies. CIA or FBI or NSA. I don’t know which one. He made an application. He’s been up for the most elite corps, I think. He told me he couldn’t ever be a good husband. He fell in love with you that night, but he also fell in love with assassinating some prime minister of some country in the Western Hemisphere in the men’s lavatory.”
“And he’s choosing that over me?”
He squinted up at the sky. “You can stop him if you want.”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s a series of interviews. They’ve called me up. I’m on the list. Only you and I know about, well, his relationship with you. His promise.”
So Nick told Herc that he’d proposed. “What promise?” She scavenged her purse for a mint.
“You can get him bounced out or maybe rerouted to something safer, I think.”
She looked at the restaurant’s plate-glass window. Normal people, doing normal things. “No,” she said. “He’s right. He’d be a lousy husband.”
“I want to help.” Herc pressed his lips together and nodded quickly. “Let me know if there’s anything I can do,” he said. “Now or in the future. I’m here for you. I mean it. Anything.” He looked at her gravely. He was saying he’d step in, wasn’t he? Was she so fragile that he thought she’d die without a husband? It was so chivalrous, she couldn’t bear it.
“I have to go.”
“I hope I see you again.” He looked at her with great hope in his eyes.
“I don’t know how we’d ever cross paths again,” she said. “I don’t even want to know if he comes back. Okay? If you see him again, tell him that I want nothing from him. Nothing at all.”
He stepped back. “Okay.”
And with that, she started walking down the street—in the wrong direction, but she kept going, her reflection flashing beside her in a series of plate-glass storefronts. She didn’t believe in marriage but still found herself thinking that she couldn’t go back and renegotiate with Max Stern. He was already taken. Lloyd Bartel was dating someone in the secretarial pool. Herc wouldn’t work because it felt like Nick was manipulating her life. Had he sent Herc as some kind of backup?
Her parents had been delighted when she’d told them she was getting married, so deeply relieved. She realized that she’d actually wanted to make them happy. But now she’d return to her life. Even though she came from a family of the sea-profiteers, war-profiteers, greed-profiteers and she didn’t really have to work—she wanted to.
In a few blocks, she stopped at an ice cream truck, ordered an elaborate triple-scoop cone. She took two small bites then threw it in a trash can.
She would never give in to a man again. That was it. This wouldn’t just be the end of Nick Flemming. It would be the end of all men in her life. She decided to close up shop, emotionally.
Of course that wasn’t the end of Nick Flemming.
Not at all.
Four months later, he showed up at her apartment while she was packing to head back to New Jersey. Her father had died—an aneurysm that took him immediately. Her mother was ill.
She refused to let him in.
He knocked on the door, insistently, and finally her roommate answered. “What could you possibly want?”
He gave the roommate cash, asked her if she wouldn’t mind going out to the nicest restaurant in town and out to a show—on him. “I’d like to bring a friend.” He gave her more money, and she put on her coat and hat and left.
Over the course of the next five hours, Nick tried to talk Augusta into a life with him—an unconventional one, yes, in which she could remain independent but not have to work, if she didn’t want to, and have children or not. “I can’t have something that I love so much that I would sell out my country if it were in danger. A family with you, Augusta? I’d give up every American secret in history for you. I want to have a life with you, but to protect you too.”
“Marriage is an overrated institution.”
“Then let’s do it our own way.”
She said no.
He didn’t reappear until the summer of 1969. There at the end of the wreckage of the 1960s, after assassination upon assassination, war, rising death tolls, there had been a glimmer of hope. Human beings had landed on the moon. They’d been thinking of each other all those years, but now stronger than ever.
And when he showed up this time, knocking on the door of a different apartment, one she lived in alone, he didn’t say a word. He stood there, gaunt and wrung out. And she didn’t say a word either. A moment of recognition flashed between them. They loved each other. They could make each other whole. They had to make it work or they wouldn’t survive.
He reached for her and they held on to each other. It was a proposal, an acceptance, a beginning.
Later that night, in bed, she said, “I want a family.”
“I do too,” he said. “We won’t do it the normal way. We can do it our way. But don’t leave me. Stick this out even though…”
The finest of capillaries in her heart burned. “I’m not going anywhere,” she said, but maybe they both knew they were doomed.
Over the course of the next few decades, he would become a high-level CIA operative, a spy, just as she’d always told her daughters. And she and Nick would have a marriage of sorts—one that remained illicit, charged, covert, and full of longing, a love that would render Augusta isolated and lonesome most of her days, but also it was a marriage that sustained her in small portions. Finally, when it became too much to bear, that winter of 1984, she would tell him that it was over. Her heart simply sighed, and she decided nothing was better than a portion.
Though they were never officially married, she divorced him—through a dead-drop letter. She would get full custody of the girls because Nick Flemming had never had any custody at all.
She cut him off and founded a Personal Honesty Movement that failed. Her oldest daughter accused her of sleeping with strangers, and, as a result, on the subject of their father, Nick Flemming, she went silent.
The last time she saw Nick, he was walking away from her, backward, gliding into a crowd of tourists, a dot of blood still fresh on the pocket of his white shirt.
Esme and Atty would be home at any moment, not to mention Ru and Liv. Ru’s flight had already landed, hadn’t it? She wondered if Ru and Liv had connected. She worried about Liv’s sobriety. Fresh out of rehab, her daughter looked washed out and, at turns, jittery or glazed over. Augusta had tried to send Jessamine to pick up Ru but Liv had insisted. She hoped Ru would drive home though even Ru could be absentminded—the dazed artistic type—from time to time.
The box seemed to be filled with coiled springs. It couldn’t be kept shut any longer. It was a tall box, square, heavily lidded, the kind you’d put a bow on and fit under a Christmas tree for a department store display.
Augusta put her hand over one corner then popped the lid.
There were letters—some small, others in business-sized envelopes, folded in half.
Nothing was written on the envelopes themselves—no addresses, stamps, post office markings.
Augusta opened one on top. The seal of the envelope had hitched back together in two spots that easily loosened. She pulled out the letter and lifted it toward the window.
H.,
I haven’t heard from you in a while. I know you’re not dead, easy enough to look up. At our age, your silence could be worse than death.
Augusta knew what Nick meant—senility.
I’ve been thinking about you a lot and the old days. It’s what people like me do.
She wasn’t sure what he meant by people like me. Was he like any other people?
Should I update you on A. and the girls still?
This too made no sense, but it made Augusta scratch her neck.
One more time?
The box was full of letters. Were these updates about her and the girls’ lives?
Not sure you’ll even get this. But here goes.
She didn’t care for his chipper tone.
They’re doing well. A. keeps starting her movements. An activist at heart. She’s still radiant.
Augusta flushed. Her movements began only after she cut Nick off from the family. She was blushing because she felt watched, spied on by a spy—and she’d expressly told him to leave them all alone—but also, she couldn’t help it: He’d called her radiant. She closed her eyes, took a cleansing breath, and read on.
And E. is still working at the boarding school. They still live on the pond. Her husband is chair. That worked out well enough. And young A. is a sass box, like I was at that age. I believe she gets her distaste for injustice from me. Remember how I used to find it so damn awful? Who knew I’d wind up an accomplice to it? All in all, I don’t know that this boarding school is the best place for them. I thought it would be a safe nest. But it might be too stifling. And you know how I dislike the Ivies. They worship the Ivies there. Luckily, I think young A.’s grades are mediocre enough to keep her out of them. Unlike E., who could have gone anywhere she damn well pleased.
She was gulping the information now. Great swaths. Packed with meaning. She couldn’t dissect it all. She said aloud, “He’s wrong there. Esme didn’t get into any of the Ivies.”
L. is married again. I admire the girl’s incredible ability to acquire a life. I don’t know what to do with the sadness—except send on gifts, here and there.
Was Liv in touch with Nick? What gifts? Anonymous ones?
R. is making a go of it. Though you know with that one, I stand down, as requested.
Augusta had requested that he leave all of his daughters alone. How had he misinterpreted this as only applying to Ru?
But I worry, you know. I worry a lot.
For an assassin, as that’s what he eventually became, he was an exceptional worrier.
As for retirement, I hate it and it hates me. Mutual disgust. I can’t shut down the sense anyway so I’ll always be on duty.
She knew that he would always be aware of eyes on him, scanning each room as he entered, knowing who was around him—forever monitoring his threat level.
Hope you’re well, old buddy.
NF
Nick Flemming was still out there, keeping tabs on all of them.
She walked quickly to her bedroom window, pulled back the curtain, and looked at the street half expecting to find him as she’d last seen him, the splotch of blood like an embroidered rose on his shirt pocket.
Augusta could hear her flooding pulse deep in her ears. She dropped the letter, took the box, and flipped it over, inverting the stack. The letters now on top weren’t in envelopes. They were brittle and written on legal-pad paper. She picked up the first one.
Herc,
I got a call—the one I’ve been waiting for. And I’m taking it.
I’d make a bad husband, and a worse father. I want to be out there. But, Herc, you wouldn’t. Meet A. at the diner, tomorrow at noon. Tell her I love her. Tell her I’m gone. I know you love her, Herc. How many times did you say I don’t deserve her? You meant that you deserve her. So do something about it.
Nick
P.S. You thought I took the club too seriously. Now I’ll live it.
Well, Jesus H. Christ. She sat on the edge of the bed. She remembered Herc in the diner. Had Herc been in love with her? He’d once said she was different from other girls, sure, but it hadn’t been a gushing compliment. He’d been asking if she wanted to be a judge on some bank-robbing panel. He had said he’d do anything for her. She’d assumed he was being chivalrous. Augusta hadn’t appreciated the offer. At the time she hadn’t labeled it as sexist, but eventually that’s how she’d revisited it. Perhaps she’d been wrong all these years. Maybe he’d wanted her to take him up on it because he’d had a thing for her but was too shy to proclaim it and then the moment passed.
She pawed through the stack, ripping open one envelope, scanning the script—skimming—and then the next.
I followed her downtown last Saturday. She tried on wedding gowns. But you said she’s not with you. So who’s the guy?
There was no guy. She just wanted to see what she would have looked like in bridal white. Had he seen her trying it on through the plate-glass window? She was glad she might have made him feel a charge of jealousy.
In another letter, he wrote,
We’re back together, A. and me. I’m setting up a way that we can keep the relationship under the radar and still communicate. It’s crazy but it might work. You’re the only friend, H., the only one who knows.
Augusta thought of the tattered family flag with its old Rockwell crest of arms that she would pass up the flagpole when she wanted to arrange a dead-drop letter under the boardwalk at their agreed-upon spot.
He explained their years of clandestine visits, babies being born, and growing up.
My God, if I’d known what it would feel like to hold a baby of my own—a brand-new baby—I might have given it all up before I started and got in too deep.
She hadn’t been enough but the babies were?
And then she got to the breakup.
I’m gone, gone, gone, he wrote. I have nothing.
But his nothingness didn’t last. What followed was a detailed accounting of years of spying—not on the enemy, but on his own family.
He’d been to Esme’s senior year winter choral program, some of her orchestra performances—only third-chair clarinet, H., but she’s damn good—an art exhibit where she’d showcased ceramic vases. I would have bought one but it wasn’t allowed.
He’d seen Liv in a geography bee. She knew Tristan de Cunha. That kid is whip-smart. He saw her play Emily in her high school production of Our Town. Choked me up. I could barely stand it. It’s how I’ve lived my life, H. I’m their ghost. Though they don’t even know I’m here with them.
He knew about Liv’s relationship with that punk Teddy Whistler. Augusta had thrown herself into saving her daughter from that young criminal, and to shield Ru from all the ugliness, but there was no shielding either of the girls. Augusta was sure that something about Liv’s relationship with Teddy turned her heart cold somehow, turned her against love. And then Ru had to go and make it all public! Augusta hated airing family issues in public.
And then, here, at the moment when Nick could have done some good, he wrote to Herc that he didn’t worry about this kid. No threat. My Liv has better sense. She’s just trying to piss her mother off. Her method is effective.
He was blaming Augusta? Good Lord.
Then she got to a letter he wrote about Esme’s college applications—those Ivies he hated so much. I took care of it. Nothing good comes of the heavy mantle of overachievers and that brand of elitism…I think she’ll take the offer to go to UVA. It’s really the best place for her.
Did he interfere with Esme’s college admissions? Did he have no boundaries?
She found a letter discussing Esme’s college boyfriend, Darwin Webber. He’d make a lousy husband. She’s better off without…I think he’ll be easy to convince…Esme had been heartbroken for months, if not years.
He talked about vetting Esme’s husband, Doug, and all three of Liv’s husbands. Full background checks.
How dare he?
He attended Ru’s graduation from eighth grade, giving a valedictorian speech on the space–time continuum and her first-round field hockey game in states, starting as a freshman, but little else.
She found a letter that simply said, I’ve been found out. When I see you in person, I’ll tell you the whole story, Herc. R. is just like her old man.
Nick was found out by Ru? How? When? The letters weren’t dated. Did she actually contact him?
She found a few mentions of Liv.
I try to make her life sweeter. Small things. I don’t know why she suffers.
I’ve given her an inheritance through a recently deceased neighbor she barely ever spoke to—surprising how little she questions the details of good things happening to her.
And in a more recent letter from the last five years, he wrote of all the girls, Sometimes I imagine showing up at their doors, but I’d never actually do it. Nothing good would come of it—not after all these years. They’re no strangers to me. But I’m a stranger to them. That imbalance alone…
She let the letter drift to the floor. She spread her hands wide on the bedspread and then gripped it tightly in two fists. She imagined him on her front stoop, young and tan from the summer of tennis on the clay courts, holding the box himself, his hands wide and sure.
And it was as if he’d been standing there all these years, waiting for her on the stoop.
He’d never gotten over her, never been able to let go of her or the girls.
The girls.
Should she tell them?
Your lives, she imagined saying to them, have not been completely your own.
“No,” she said aloud. “He should do it himself. In person. The old bastard.”
She walked to the little secretary’s desk in the corner of her bedroom and scratched out a letter.
Nick,
You need to come to the house. The girls are arriving. Get here soon. We need to settle things once and for all.
No one could really be that invested in kidnapping your children now! They’re grown women, and certainly most of your enemies are dead or senile.
She wasn’t sure how to sign off. Love? That seemed overstated. All my best? That would be dishonest. She simply went with a basic Sincerely. She was certainly being sincere.
She folded the letter angrily, using her thumbnail to crease it, slipped it into an envelope with no outward markings, and wondered, momentarily, if she’d remember where to drop it. Then she worried if the drop location still existed. It could have been washed out by the hurricane.
Of course, the letters had stopped and Bill Huckley didn’t know whether Nick was dead or alive. She could be trying to communicate with a ghost, but that had always been a fear. It was one she was used to.
She put the envelope in her pocketbook and walked downstairs and out the front door. She didn’t lock it. The girls didn’t have keys.
She marched to the boardwalk, and at the familiar spot, she walked down the wooden steps to the beach, took off her shoes, and set foot on sand for the first time in decades. She dipped under the boardwalk’s slats. People clomped overhead, pulling their rolling coolers and dragging their rafts, clipping the light with their shadows.
She found the little cove in the back of the boardwalk—its red paint had faded to pink and some young punk had written SHERRI B. HAS LICE PANTIES over part of the mark, but it was enough to direct her to the familiar crevice.
She slipped the letter in and let her fingers grip the wood for a moment, as she used to long ago, and she remembered—quickly and viscerally—what it was like to miss Nick with her entire body, to feel dizzy and wrung out with longing. As awful as it was then, she missed the feeling now.
They never did have a wedding, but when Esme and Liv were still little and left behind in Jessamine’s care for a weekend, she bought a wedding dress, changing on the bench seat of a rented car, and they drove out into West Virginia and rented horses at an old farm.
“We’re newlyweds,” Nick told the farmer.
“I can tell,” the old man said. He looked at Augusta. “She shouldn’t ride sidesaddle. It’s not safe.”
“I won’t,” Augusta said.
Augusta did ride with her veil on, though. It floated behind her. Out in the middle of a field of wildflowers, they exchanged vows they made up on the spot, ones she couldn’t remember.
After that, they stopped at a bed-and-breakfast somewhere in North Carolina, and for the first time in their lives Nick signed the registry as Mr. and Mrs. Nolan—a stolen name?
Later, after they had sex, Augusta took a drag from his cigarette and said, “Who are Mr. and Mrs. Nolan?” She expected it to be neighbors from his childhood or someone he’d always admired from politics.
“We are,” he said, and then he whispered into her ear.
And now she pushed off the boardwalk’s underpinnings and walked back into the full sun, which made her eyes flutter.
Nick Flemming. Did he think of her still? Miss her? Had he finally settled down with another woman? Could he be dead or senile—as Augusta had depicted his enemies?
What if the go-between was the dead one? Their dead-drop letter relied on a go-between.
She walked home, muttering things as she went. “Won’t be long now…One way or another…I’ll know by not hearing anything…”
When she got home, the house was still empty. She marched up the stairs and into her room.
Once there, for the first time in twenty-nine years, Augusta Rockwell went to her family’s cedar chest that sat at the foot of her bed, lifted the lid, and unfolded the old, frayed Rockwell family flag.
She opened her bedroom window, thrust her upper body into the salty air, and, with great exertion, attached the flag to its rusty latches and let it snap in the wind.
Down below, two cars pulled up and parked in the narrow driveway, single file. Esme and Atty got out of the first car, a cane rocking chair strapped to the roof. Atty was holding a stack of ten Nancy Drew mysteries and wearing a fanny pack, which Augusta was sure that only old people and heavyset tourists wore these days.
They looked up at Augusta, who nodded to them.
Liv and Ru got out of the second car. Liv wore enormous sunglasses blocking out most of her face. Ru pulled her bag out of the backseat but then, as she looked up at the house, she dropped it on the lawn.
“Good God!” she said.
All of the women looked at her and said, “What?”
“Holy shit,” Ru said. “The old spy. You’re calling him in.”
Esme, Liv, and Atty didn’t understand what she meant, but Augusta did, of course. “Yes,” she said. “How’d you know?” She also meant—What do you know? How long have you known it? And how did you find out?
But Ru took the question literally. “The flag,” she said, pointing at it. “Obviously.”