Page 23

Street corner, Norrmalm, Stockholm

In the wee morning hours, Yardley pulled her stocking cap down over her ears and adjusted her round, dark-framed eyeglasses, stomping her feet against the cold.

She’d done her best impression of a cat burglar when she snuck out of the dark safe house, leaving KC asleep in the same room with the asset it was Yardley’s shift to guard—all so she could make a phone call over an unsecured international long-distance line.

She listened to the long series of hums and clicks from the black receiver pressed against her ear. She’d found it dangling from the round, red, coin-operated housing of what was probably the last functioning Swedish pay phone, but thankfully it still worked.

Yardley had used this phone before, tucked around the corner from one of the newer, automated twenty-four-hour convenience stores that were popping up everywhere.

When the call connected, her heart grew warm at the familiar voice. “I was just getting ready to sit myself down with a sweet tea, Miss Yardley, so it’s a good moment for a yak.”

It was very late in North Carolina, but Yardley hadn’t been worried about waking up her nan, who was a night owl and liked to sit outside in the dark with a glass of tea, taking the air.

“Nan.” Yardley breathed out tension she hadn’t known she’d been holding. “I can’t talk too long.”

Her nan laughed. It was a laugh that could have just as easily come from an eighteen-year-old debutante as from a tiny senior lady—feminine, musical, and schooled, but warm enough to make anyone smile.

“Well, I don’t imagine you can. You’re not dodging gunfire right now or hanging from a wire somewhere? ”

“No, ma’am.” Yet Yardley could not claim to be exercising immaculate judgment.

She didn’t think the pay phone was bugged, any more than she thought a pregnant woman who was wanted by multiple international interests but had deliberately sought out both KC and the CIA was likely to take off, but she couldn’t be sure.

What Yardley was sure of was that she didn’t have a prayer of working through the mess in her head without help.

She’d told KC it was dangerous to bottle up her feelings on a mission, and she’d felt that same danger building inside her all through yesterday afternoon as they’d pumped an exhausted Kris Flynn for every scrap of useful information.

By nightfall, Yardley had made up her mind to call her nan for a private talk at the earliest opportunity—even if she had to make one.

“Well, get to it, buttercup.”

“KC,” she said, squeezing the receiver.

“Is a peach. Smart, makes a nice income, treats you right, doesn’t annoy me, can deal with your mama.”

“Yes.” Yardley bit her lip and poked at the coin slot.

“What’s got you twisted up? You’re going to have to tighten your girdle and come out with it.”

Yardley had never told her nan she and KC were having trouble, much less that they’d reached the end of their road. Telling Nan something was what made it real. “I found out we’re in the same line of work.”

“Well. You didn’t know that?”

Yardley forced herself to look up, survey the area, and count to five.

She couldn’t have said for sure what she was feeling—a mix of irritation, anger, and something deeper than both.

Shame, probably. It was usually shame when she hated what she felt but didn’t know what to call it. “Nan, I had no idea.”

“You met this woman at a picnic practically in the backyard of Langley. She once visited with my Brazilian gardener in his native Portuguese. She’s hardly taller than me, but she could lift your granddaddy over her head if she wanted to. You really thought she made websites?”

Yardley tightened her mouth, feeling the first blast of resistance to being wrong. “I trusted her and believed she was who she told me.”

“Did you? Then what part of what she told you did you believe, what came out of her mouth or what has been coming from her, from KC, all this time? Her focus and her competence, her sense of service, the way she can put together a whole library of information as pretty as one of those college-educated preachers? Have you seen that, or have you been too damn busy saving the world in fancy outfits?”

“Well, you didn’t know that granddaddy—”

“Yardley Lauren Bailey Whitmer the Third. You weren’t raised to sass at me like that.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am.” Yardley squeezed the receiver. Her throat had begun to ache. “I only meant when we love someone, we don’t question what they tell us.”

“Let me tell you something, then. I actually don’t think I did love your granddaddy like I should have, nor did I muster up the curiosity and interest I should have felt about the man I married.

I have regrets. I wasted time. I centered myself so much, buttercup, that I couldn’t see past my own fiction that he must be stepping out on me when he was gone like he was. That’s because I was hurt.”

“Because granddaddy never should have lied to you,” Yardley said. “He should have trusted you.”

“Not my point,” her nan said briskly. “Hormones and infatuation got me to the altar, but what should have deepened and mellowed into love got stuck on fear. And let me tell you, did I let it fester. By the time he did tell me about himself, what my feelings had deepened into was anger. I thought I had never been so angry at another human being in my life. It took me a long time to understand I was angry at myself.”

“He kept so much from you, though,” Yardley said, a few tears leaking now. She’d been telling this story—to herself, to Atlas, to KC—but she hadn’t been telling it right. “You can’t put that completely on you.”

“No.” Nan laughed. “I can’t. But I can’t tell you his side of the story and his regrets.

That’s for him to say. I can tell you that man loved his work and might’ve had a talk with his supervisors about my level of classification.

It wasn’t unheard of for a wife to understand more than I did, even then.

But, my love, can’t you see how a man like your granddaddy, who had so much to offer, wouldn’t have given more and more of his big heart and his big love to his work if it wasn’t true that I wasn’t making any space for him to give it to me?

His commitment and heart had to go somewhere.

I made myself someplace he couldn’t get to. ”

Oh, shit. Yardley’s diaphragm jerked hard, pushing the breath out of her body as she thought of KC with one hand on her ergonomic mouse, a bank of monitors lit up bright in front of her while Yardley wheeled her suitcase out the door.

She’d done that. She’d made herself someplace KC couldn’t get to. Her friends. Her book club. Her business trips. Her secrets.

It’s like a simple conversation with me isn’t enough.

She slumped against the side of the payphone enclosure, tracing a path down the enameled red metal with one fingertip. “I have messed things up but good.”

“I bet. More important, what are you going to do about it?”

“What did you and Granddaddy do? It would be helpful if you could give it to me in an easy-to-remember saying. You know, one of those ones with an animal and a rhyme in it.”

“ Yardley .”

“I’m desperate, Nan.” Yardley felt the truth, the real truth, start to crack out of her chest the way it always did when she talked to Nan.

There was a reason her grandmother was the person she had come out to in middle school, who knew she was the Unicorn, and who was the first one Yardley called when her private school headmaster threatened to suspend her for making out with Amy Truebill backstage during the school’s production of The Crucible .

Because her nan had always made space for her, listened to and understood her, and that meant that whatever truths Yardley had been hiding from herself, they came bursting out of her when they spoke.

“She’s it for me,” Yardley said in a rush.

“And I didn’t tell you, but we’ve fought, and then we broke up, and then did that again after we knew we were both spies, and right now, well, what I can say is that we’re not in a kiss-and-make-up kind of circumstance.

” Yardley forced herself to scan the street for irregularities or a tail to rule out the possibility of being killed in a phone booth while choking out a litany of stupid mistakes to her nan.

“But I don’t want to feel like this even one more minute, even if it’s also true that I’m not sure about the precise, let’s say, entanglements that KC may have in this mission. ”

It made her feel better to confess this.

If it had been true that KC was a double agent, and Yardley had felt that truth inside her heart, she definitely would have said so to Nan.

But she didn’t feel compelled to tell about her secret mission to figure out exactly what KC was hiding.

According to the rules of magical thinking, that meant the universe wanted Yardley to understand that KC Nolan was no traitor.

She heard her nan sigh. There was a soft clink Yardley recognized as the sound the iced tea glasses made when they were set down on the patio table.

Yardley would have given a lot to be right there right now, on a dark patio in North Carolina with her nan, and with KC beside her. In this fantasy, she had already figured everything out, and it was easy, and no trouble would ever come to her again.

“The only thing I can tell you, Yardley, is you’re still breathing, so it’s not too late.”

“For what?”

“It’s not too late to do whatever it is you should’ve done in the first place if you hadn’t been afraid. What you would have done, every minute, from the first moment you knew you wanted this woman, if you had no fear.”

Yardley relaxed her vigilance for just a moment so she could ask herself what that was.

Be with her all the time. Tell her everything about me. Ask her everything about her.