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Ivy shared a two-bedroom apartment with three other young women, all stenos.

Each one pleasant, pretty, and hoping to catch the eye of some young executive.

Trade up to a wedding ring and starter home.

Ivy told them she was a lowly girl Friday, filer of papers and fetcher of coffee and sandwiches.

Not in one of the glossy downtown high-rises where her roommates worked, but in a dowdy, low-slung stucco shoebox at the edge of the military base.

Whenever one of them asked about her job, she made it sound as bland as possible.

Soon enough they stopped asking, but they never lost interest in what she planned to do with herself on the weekends.

The stenos fretted about Ivy’s days off.

They spent theirs at home with their families, doing laundry, seeing high school friends, eating home-cooked meals.

“You must miss your family, being so far away,” said one. “Did you say they live in Dallas?”

“Houston,” said Ivy. To make the stenos feel better, she lied and told them how excited she was to go home for Thanksgiving.

Her chest still ached for Ruth, but more sporadically now.

Sometimes she allowed herself to imagine how impressed her family would be to learn that she earned her own keep by serving her country, even if the purpose of her work wasn’t exactly clear to her.

On lonelier days she was tempted to call.

Until she remembered: she wasn’t really theirs.

She was just a burden George had carried for Vivian.

A burden Vivian had refused to pick up. A burden that George obviously didn’t want returned, because Vivian hadn’t exactly tried to send Ivy back home.

They were all relieved she was gone. She trained herself to squash thoughts of her family. To focus her attention elsewhere.

Usually listening to the voices did the trick.

She wasn’t sure what the Ivy League boys were listening to, but on Ivy’s tapes, people spoke of this general or that colonel, evaluated their potential allies, their potential good faith.

Ivy supposed that someone whose good faith was unquestionable secretly recorded these voices.

She was grateful to this person, not for patriotic reasons—the necessity of the recordings was, at this point, still opaque to her—but because the voices became her new family.

One she pictured vividly as she listened to them bicker, come to some temporary accord, then set to bickering all over again.

Today she heard a familiar voice on the tape.

The people on the recordings—usually men, but occasionally a woman—didn’t use their real names.

There were lots of Viets and Nguyens. Which she had learned mirrored the population at large.

Some were savvy enough not to use any name at all.

But she got to know certain voices. This one, familiar, belonged to one of the savvy no-named men.

It had a rich timbre that made Ivy wish she could hear him sing.

Privately, she thought of him as Sinatra.

It wasn’t only his voice that was familiar, but the words he spoke.

“We must prepare to welcome our friends from across Asia,” intoned Sinatra.

His French was beautiful. He’d had better teachers than Mme Forrest. But what intrigued her was “friends from across Asia.” She stopped the tape, rewound, and listened again.

She’d heard that phrase almost two weeks earlier, the day of what she now thought of as the coffeepot incident.

And he’d said it prior to that, she was certain. She just couldn’t remember when.

“This is probably nothing,” she said to Sam Benson.

“Never start with ‘This is probably nothing.’ People already want to think it—don’t let them imagine that you agree.”

“Okay. I noticed something strange. Sinatra—”

She winced at Sam’s puzzled look—here she was revealing how frivolous she was, undercutting herself yet again. “I give some of them nicknames when I listen. The ones who don’t go by fake names.”

His smile was encouraging. “Go on.”

“This one man—he has a nice voice, so I call him Sinatra—he keeps using the same phrase. He’s used it at least three times on tapes I’ve listened to.

‘Our friends across Asia.’ No one else in these conversations ever mentions any friends in Asia.

And he always uses those exact words: ‘our friends across Asia.’”

“That’s very interesting, Miss Shaw. Thank you for letting me know.”

Two days later she was escorted to a different office where she started a new job.

Something more consonant with her abilities.

Now, in addition to translating the words, she analyzed the intent behind them.

She attended briefings on competing South Vietnamese factions and feuds. No one asked her to make coffee.

Each morning as she slipped her headphones on, she looked around for Sam.

He was rarely there, and when he was, he mostly ignored her.

Stop it, she told herself. He was nothing special—a thirtysomething-ish man of nondescript features who wore a wrinkled suit.

His smile was kind, but he deployed it freely to everyone, not just her.

He probably never thought of her at all, which meant she shouldn’t think so much about him either.

She listened to the tapes for months. Then one day he perched on the edge of her desk.

“Miss Shaw. What would you say to some work in the field?”