needing to be away from him.
Cameron’s long legs kept up. “Do you have anyone to meet you? A place to stay?”
“I’ll find something.”
His hand caught her elbow. “Eve. Stop. Let me help you, for God’s sake.”
She wrenched free. He didn’t mean any harm, but she couldn’t bear to be touched. There were a lot of things she was finding she couldn’t bear, now that she was out of prison. Open windows. Crowds. Wide spaces without corners to set her back against. Sleep . . .
“Keep it Miss Gardiner, Cameron. Far better that way.” She looked out at the ocean rather than meet his gaze. His soft eyes might swallow her whole, and Eve couldn’t be soft. Not now. “Tell me,” she said instead. “We d-d-didn’t get much news about the war, inside p-prison, and now no one wants to go over old battles. Lili’s last message, the one about the Verdun assault.” Over and over, Eve had wondered how that assault went. What they changed by getting that message through. “How did things go down?”
“The French commander received your information.” Cameron looked as if he wanted to stop there, but Eve’s gaze pierced him, and he continued reluctantly. “The report about the coming assault was given, but it wasn’t believed. Losses were—well. Very bad.”
Eve squeezed her eyes shut, feeling something rise in her throat. It was either a laugh or a scream. “So it was all worth nothing.” Lili giving up her freedom so that report could get through. Eve leaving Cameron’s sleeping arms and walking back into mortal danger because such reports were worth risking her life for. All of it rendered useless. Nothing Eve or Lili or Violette had done had avoided the bloodbath. “Nothing I did in France ever amounted to anything.”
His voice was fierce. “No. Do not think that.” He would have seized her shoulders but he sensed her recoil. “The Alice Network saved hundreds, Eve. Perhaps thousands. You were the best network in the war. None of the others in France or Belgium ever equaled it.”
Eve smiled, mirthless. Who cared about praise when the failures were so much bigger than the victories? That miracle chance in ’15 to kill the kaiser—failed. Stopping the assault on Verdun—failed. Keeping the network together after Lili’s arrest—failed.
Cameron had gone on. “I don’t know if you’ve read Major Allenton’s communications. He says you never responded. But you’ve been awarded these. He meant to award them to you at Louise’s funeral. She received the same, posthumously.”
Eve refused to take the case, so after an awkward pause, Cameron opened it for her. Four medals glittered in Eve’s blurring vision.
“The Medaille de Guerre. The Croix de Guerre, with palm. The Croix de la Legion d’Honneur. And the Order of the British Empire. Awarded in honor of your war efforts.”
Tin toys. Eve took a hand from her pocket at last and knocked them to the ground, trembling. “I don’t want any medals.”
“Then Major Allenton will hold them for you—”
“Cram them up his arse!”
Cameron gathered up Eve’s medals and dropped them back into the case. “I didn’t want mine either, believe me.”
“But you had to take them, because you’re still in the army.” Eve gave a one-note bark of a laugh. “The army doesn’t want me anymore. I did my part and the war’s over, so now they’ll pin some b-bits of tin on me and tell me to bugger off back to the file room. Well, they can keep their damned tin scraps.”
Cameron flinched this time at her language. His eyes dropped, and Eve realized she hadn’t put her hand back in her pocket. His eyes went from her fingers to her face and back, as though he were seeing the demure quiet-voiced girl he’d sent away to France with her carpetbag and her soft hands and her innocence. War and torture and prison and René Bordelon had happened, and now she was nothing like that girl. She was a damaged wreck of a woman with a foul mouth and destroyed hands and no innocence at all. Not your fault, Eve wanted to say to the guilty sorrow in his eyes, but he wouldn’t believe her. She sighed, flexing her ruined fingers.
“You had to kn-kn-kn—to know about these,” she said. “There was a report.”
“Knowing’s not the same as seeing.” He reached out for the crippled hand, but stopped himself. She was glad. She didn’t want to keep shoving him away; he hadn’t earned that. He gave a sigh of his own instead. “Let’s get