“Kiss her till she can’t breathe, ask her to stay. But she wouldn’t.”
“No?”
“She loves the Motherland, just enough more than me. Is all there is to say.” Nina looked at Ian. “I love her, I lose her. I don’t love anyone else. Is better.”
For who? Ian wanted to lash back. But he stamped the anger down, and under it the pain. There was a dark-eyed Moscow rose in a training cockpit somewhere behind the Iron Curtain, and against her he stood no chance.
“I wouldn’t have asked if I’d known,” he said at last. “I’m sorry.”
Nina nodded acknowledgment.
“I’ll begin divorce proceedings,” Ian went on, stripping his voice to a matter-of-fact flatness. “No sense waiting until this chase is over; it could drag on for months.”
Another nod. “Is best.”
Ian rose, shrugging into his clothes. Nina slid into her own. They didn’t say another word.
Chapter 47
Jordan
September 1950
Boston
Jordan hadn’t intended to go to the Scollay Square apartment at all. She’d been mindlessly walking the pathways on the Common all morning, forgetting her hat on a bench somewhere, gripping the Leica like a lifeline. Gripping her pocketbook too, where she’d hidden those long-ago photographs of Anneliese in the kitchen, Anneliese’s bouquet with its swastika, Anneliese with the man she said was her father, because Jordan didn’t dare leave them in the darkroom. Anneliese never came down to the darkroom, or she said she didn’t, but Jordan wasn’t sure of anything anymore. What did Anneliese really do all day? Jordan was appalled at the speculations that now prowled through her mind.
She’d managed to avoid facing her stepmother over the supper table the last few nights, claiming work. “If I’m going to New York so soon, I need to have everything ready—” and Anneliese was so warmly encouraging of anything that advanced that plan. “I’ll make you some cocoa to take down.” Jordan couldn’t work after that, just stare into the mug that Anneliese always topped with a dash of cinnamon, because she knew that was how Jordan liked it, and try to make sense of it all.
“Look at this logically, J. Bryde,” she had muttered aloud to the darkroom’s silence. “Step by step. And get it right this time.” She’d already gone down the path of suspicion before, after all, and it had blown up in her face. I am not doing that again.
So. An unexplained absence, not to Concord or New York but somewhere unknown. Maybe Anna went to meet a man, Jordan thought. If she has her eye on someone new, so soon after Dad, she would hide that from me. But a new suitor in her life didn’t account for that strange scene with Kolb. Some kind of fraud at the shop? There were all kinds of swindles that could take place in the antiques business; perhaps Kolb had dragged her into something unsavory. But I saw the look on his face; he’s terrified of her. He wouldn’t dare try to drag her into anything she didn’t want. Could Anneliese be the one who had initiated some shop swindle, and dragged Kolb along? What financial trouble could she have that would make her risk everything for a little extra cash? Risk the shop’s reputation, risk legal charges, risk Jordan’s father finding out?
Dad suspected, the cold thought whispered. He told you he had his doubts about Kolb, and right afterward—
But that thought stopped in its tracks, driving her out of the darkroom to walk the Common for the rest of the morning. Anneliese was with me when Dad left for that hunting trip, Jordan thought, aimlessly drifting toward the Common bandstand. She was with me all morning as I tried on wedding dresses.
That didn’t silence the cold voice. What a terrible thing suspicion was, once you let it have full rein. Jordan didn’t think she would ever be able to get this beast on a leash again, and she couldn’t avoid Anneliese forever, ducking supper and hiding in the morning behind a newspaper. Sooner or later, Anneliese was going to realize something was wrong.
And what are you going to do, J. Bryde? You can’t run to your father with your suspicions this time. Who are you going to tell? There’s no one but you.
Jordan realized she’d stopped by the pillared marble bandstand. Tony had kissed her here on their third date. She ran her hand along the marble, wishing for him viscerally—not to kiss, not to cling to, but to listen. No one listened like him; under all the grins and jokes he