Page 28 of The Paris Agent
“Not upset, but I was shocked. I was and am anxious for them—God only knows the hospital would not take kindly to two female doctors in a romantic relationship. But I know that Maman and Quinn love one another deeply and what form their love takes beyond closed doors is none of my business—I’m only glad they have each other. The problem isn’t that they are lovers. The problem is the lies, Noah. Why not just be honest with me at least once I became an adult? Why let me think for my whole lifethat Maman had to move to Paris because of me?”
“There may still have been some truth in that,” Noah offered gently.
I sighed impatiently.
“Perhaps a grain of truth. Shedidhave to support me all on her own, but only because my father found out about her relationship with Quinn and blackmailed her. If Maman tried to insist that he give her money, he would tell the hospital what she and Quinn had been up to, and that would have ruined both of their careers.”
“Oh.”
Aunt Quinn had been a fixture in my life from my earliest memories, and the voice of reason when Maman and I were at war after my return to London, but I even managed to alienate her on that last, bitter morning before I boarded the plane for my mission. As we all sat together in a terse, awkward silence around the kitchen table, Quinn finally spoke.
“Your mother and I love one another, Josie. Try to understand. We never wanted to hurt you—”
“You’ve been lying to me for my entire life!” I choked. Maman made a sound of distress, and Quinn reached to squeeze her shoulder gently. “You bothtreat me like I’m still a child, even now! Don’t tell me you didn’t want to hurt me when you didn’t even trust me with the truth.”
“And this WAAF business you’ve been so busy with,” Quinn countered, her face hardening. That was the lie the SOE had me tell people—that I’d enlisted in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, and whenever I was away training or on mission, it was for them. “Have you toldusthe truth about that? Because I’ve never heard of any other WAAF recruit spending months away at training and returning tanned and covered in bruises and scrapes the way you do. And you’re back unannounced this morning. You’re here to say goodbye because you’re being deployed?” I nodded silently, and Aunt Quinn pursed her lips. “Let me guess, Josie. The ‘WAAF’ is sending you somewhere top secret and you can’t tell us a thing about your trip. Am I right?”
I was a hypocrite, and it seemed we all knew it. They had valid reasons for hiding their truth, just as I had valid reasons for hiding mine. But my emotions were running too high for me to be reasonable, and that’s exactly why I had to leave that morning. I felt so fragile that if we kept trying to hash it out, we’d end up screaming at one another, and I couldn’t leave for my first mission after a morning like that. I felt like a string pulled too taut already.
In time, we could all be honest—and maybe then, we’d finally understand one another. All we needed was some time.
“It must have been so different in your house?” I said, deflecting the conversation back to Noah because I knew I’d end up weeping if I kept talking.
“Oh, God yes,” he chuckled. “Five boys? It was madness, just chaos all the time. But I miss that, even now.” He paused for a long time before he added, “I want a family of my own, Josie. I want to settle down the minute the war ends. I want to move on andforgetabout all of this madness.”
He told me more about Geraldine, his first love, and how important she had been in his life.
“We met at a dance just after I enlisted,” he told me. “In lots of ways, she’s my perfect opposite—I like to listen, she likes to talk. I like to stay in, she likes to go out. I wilt plants just by looking at them, she has a green thumb.”
“Back when we were on the escape line, you seemed so certain you’d marry her,” I remarked.
“I was,” Noah said. “I might even have proposed by now except that my family was gone when I got back, and the grief seemed so heavy I wasn’t sure how I’d get out from under it.Shehelped me to breathe again, but then the SOE invited me to try out. I couldn’t tell Gerrie the details, obviously, but I did tell her I’d been invited to join the war effort in a way I couldn’t explain, and she made it very clear that she wasn’t willing to sit around waiting another year to find out if I was dead or alive. The thing is, the minute the SOE interviewed me, I knew I wouldn’t even ask her to wait. We argued at first.” He hesitated, then murmured. “I don’t think I ever told you this, Josie, but she was always jealous of you.”
“Of me?” I repeated, then I laughed softly. “That’s madness.”
“I was completely honest about you. I told her how much you helped me through that journey from Paris to London. I told her about our letters and even those visits we had back home,” he said quietly. We met up only once or twice after our return. Geraldine was out of town the time I went to Liverpool, and Noah came to see me when I was stuck in a rehabilitation hospital after surgery in 1942, but they’d already broken up by then because he was about to start SOE training. “It didn’t matter what I said. Gerrie wasalwaysconvinced something more had happened between you and I.”
“She must not have known you well, then,” I whispered. “You’d never betray someone you loved like that.”
“I’d like to think not,” he said carefully, then he cleared his throat. “You justneverknow what people will do under pressure-cooker circumstances. And I do think it drove her a bit mad that she had no clue what was happening to me for the time I was missing. Before I was MIA for that year, she was just bright and bold and vivacious and lovely. But once I came back, she wanted to control just about every aspect of our lives. And besides...”
“...besides?” I repeated, startled. But the darkness of our apartment had been a shroud of privacy and secrecy, and as the silence stretched, it started to feel dangerous. Noah shifted suddenly, to prop himself up on his elbow.
“We never crossed a line,” he whispered. “But she was right to be jealous anyway. You and I shared an experience that other people just could never understand and right from the early days, when we were traveling out of France and we barely knew one another, I’ve felt close to you in a way that seems...”
Now, I understood. I shifted too, propping myself up on my elbow so that we were face-to-face.
“Our bond is unique. It’s just utterly unique.”
“Exactly.”
“That leaves us vulnerable here on our mission, you know.”
“We won’t let it get in the way of our work. It hasn’t so far.”
“I’m not a distraction to you?”
I heard him draw in a shuddering breath at that, and for a moment, I wondered if he was going to kiss me. But instead, he turned and collapsed down onto his back to stare at the ceiling, and his voice was tender as he answered, “Only in the very best kind of way.”
