Page 25 of The Paris Agent
“Dad,” I call. He turns back to look at me but his expression is twisted with frustration or pain or...guilt? “Dad, are you okay?”
“I just need a moment,” he says abruptly, and he’s already turning toward the carpark. I start to follow him, but I can’t escape the feeling that we got Theo in trouble somehow, and I want to make sure he’s okay too.
“I just need to speak with Theo,” I blurt. “I’ll catch up.”
“Good.” Dad raises his hand in acknowledgment without turning around. “I’ll see you at the car.” But after a few steps he turns back to me. His expression is carefully neutral as he adds, “Thank him for me, please, Charlotte.”
“I will,” I call.
I am completely, hopelessly confused. What on earth just happened?
I return to the park bench beneath the tree and watch the man with the lawn mower finish his job—but the minute the engine switches off, sounds of distant shouting echo down from upstairs in the history building. My gut twists uncomfortably as I look up and locate Professor Read’s open window and those gauze curtains waving in the breeze. I can’t make out any of the words, but Read sounds furious.
When Theo finally comes down the front steps a few minutes later, he looks even more frazzled than he did when we arrived. His footsteps slow as he approaches me.
“Well, that was odd,” I offer uncertainly. He forces a smile.
“Indeed. I suppose it would all seem very odd.”
“I hope we didn’t get you into trouble.”
Theo sighs and takes a seat beside me.
“Charlotte, the miserable truth is that I am more than capable of doing that all on my own. Is your father okay?”
“He seems so upset. I don’t understand why the professor was laboring the point about how and where the agents were traveling that day. What difference does it even make in the scheme of things?”
“Ah. I suppose I can at least shed some light on that for you. Years ago, I sat in on an interview with an American POW who met Fleur on a prison transport a few months before she died. He told us that she was arrested after traveling in a car through Salon-La-Tour. At the time, Read assumed that the American had the details mixed up because car travel was banned in that part of France after D-day in an effort by the Germans to slow the resistance down, and it seemed so unlikely that three agents would ignore that. Read was probably trying make sense of that now that he finally has access to someone who was there.”
“Oh,” I said. I look at him curiously. “But...how did you know Fleur hurt her ankle?”
“Lucky guess.” Theo shrugs, looking away, but he’s not a great liar and he looks guilty as hell.
“Right...”
“It’s clear your dad just wants to talk to Remy so maybe once he has some closure there, he’ll be ready to talk to Harry some more.”
“It’s very difficult for me to imagine my father working as some kind of covert agent twenty-odd years ago,” I confess. “Until a few weeks ago, I thought he was an army mechanic and I assumed he’d been based here in Britain the whole time. I found that hard enough to imagine, let alone him driving illicit vehicles through occupied France.”
“It took me two years to complete my Master’s with Professor Read,” Theo says. “For much of that time it was my job to interview men like your father. You do a job like that for long enough and you come to realize that whoever someone is during war years, there is no guarantee that they will be the same in peacetime. Some of these men and women were completely broken by their experiences, but others came back from the war and drew a line under it...declared themselves entirely new people. Maybe at first they were trying to pretend they’d never seen and done the horrific things they had to do to survive, but sometimes they live the lie so long and so well they really do become someone different. You can’t blame your dad for doing what he had to in moving on from the war, especially given his memory was disrupted in that accident too. And youreallyshouldn’t blame yourself for struggling to picture him as whoever he was before.”
“Thank you,” I say softly. “And you? Are you okay?”
Theo smiles.
“I’m fine. The conversation I just had with Harry, as awful as it was, was several years overdue.”
My father is silent as we drive home. I try to make small talk but he answers me in grunts and shrugs.
“That’s strange about the letters never arriving...” I offer.
“It is,” Dad says grimly.
“Do you know what might have happened there?” He shrugs noncommittally. “No theories at all?”
“I don’t want to speak about this right now, Charlotte,” he says. Dad isn’t the kind to snap—but his tone is sharper than I’m used to, and I recoil in surprise. He looks at me, frustrated, then his expression suddenly softens. “I just need to think, okay? We can talk about it later.”
“Okay, Dad,” I say.
