Chapter 1 #2
“Darling, I know everything. It is both my greatest gift and my heaviest burden.” She smiled serenely and lifted another spoonful to her lips. “Now eat. We have an entire evening ahead of us, and I intend to enjoy every moment of it.”
The evening unfolded slowly, the way good evenings do.
We finished the soup. We opened wine—a better bottle than the one Thomas had been cooking with—and moved to the small sitting area, where the Baroness claimed the most comfortable chair as though it had been reserved for her since the flat was built.
She regaled us with stories of Swiss high society, each more absurd than the last. As the wine took hold and time passed, her laughter gradually lost its brittle edge.
But I watched her closely.
I couldn’t help it.
Years of training had made observation as natural as breathing, and the Baroness, for all her brilliance at deception, was not trying to deceive us. She was simply trying to forget, if only for a few hours, whatever weight she carried.
She flinched, almost imperceptibly, when a car backfired in the street below.
Her eyes flicked to the door whenever footsteps passed in the hallway.
She had positioned herself with a clear view of both the entrance and the window—the instinctive choice of someone who had learned to always know where the exits were.
I knew those habits. They were deeply engrained in my being.
The Baroness was afraid.
I didn’t think she was panicked or paralyzed—she was too formidable for that—but she appeared afraid in the way of someone who had glimpsed something terrible and couldn’t quite look away.
“You’re staring, William,” she said.
“Just admiring the company.”
“Liar.” But there was affection in the word. “You are trying to read me. You have been doing it all evening. It is one of your more endearing qualities, even when it is also one of your most irritating.”
“I’m sorry, Baroness. I’m just worried about you.”
She was quiet for a moment. Then she set down her wine glass and met my eyes. For just a moment, her mask slipped entirely. I saw exhaustion there. And fear. I saw a woman who had spent weeks—perhaps months—carrying something too heavy to bear alone.
“I know,” she said softly. “And I am grateful, more than you know.” She reached out and squeezed my hand, her fingers cold despite the warmth of the room. “Now. Thomas. You still have not told me about Vienna. I heard there was a chandelier involved as well as the skylight.”
Thomas groaned. “There was no chandelier.”
“That is not what my sources say.”
“Your sources are mistaken.”
“My sources are never mistaken. They are occasionally incomplete, but never mistaken.” She smiled, and this time it almost reached her eyes. “Come now, indulge me. I have had a very trying few weeks, and I deserve entertainment.”
Thomas sighed the sigh of a man who knew resistance was futile and began to tell the tale of a mission few in the CIA even knew had occurred. That the Baroness knew of it was baffling.
Two bottles and several hours later, when Thomas offered to accompany her back to her hotel, the Baroness refused to return.
“There are too many eyes in that place, and the concierge has a face like a suspicious fish.” Instead of rising to leave, she claimed our sofa with the regal authority of a queen commandeering her throne. We tried to offer her our bed, but she refused that, too.
Thomas found blankets and a pillow while I banked the fire, and by the time we had finished, she had already arranged herself in a nest of cushions, her hair loose around her shoulders.
“Thank you,” she murmured as we turned to leave. “For tonight . . . and for not pressing.”
“We’re here when you’re ready,” I said.
“I know.” She smiled faintly. “That is why I came.”
Thomas and I retreated to our bedroom, closing the door softly behind us. We undressed in silence and slipped beneath the covers.
“She’s scared,” Thomas said quietly, his voice barely above a whisper.
“I know.”
“I’ve never seen her scared before.”
“Neither have I.”
He was quiet for a moment. I felt him shift closer, his warmth pressing against my side.
“Whatever it is,” he said, “whatever she tells us tomorrow, I bet it’s going to be bad. I can feel it.”
I stared at the ceiling, thinking about the Baroness’s careful deflections, the fear she couldn’t quite hide, and the way she had flinched at sounds and watched the door.
She had spent decades navigating the treacherous waters of Swiss politics and international espionage.
She had survived the war and the peace that followed.
If something had frightened her enough to flee to Paris—
“Yeah,” I said. “It is.”
Thomas found my hand beneath the blankets and laced our fingers.
We lay there in the darkness, listening to the wind rattle the windows and the distant sounds of the city settling into sleep.
We held on to what we had—the warmth, the silence, the simple fact of being together—and tried not to think about what morning would bring.