add any more confusion, and Jean led him from the room.
Once they’d left, Sophie’s cousin Jamie spoke. ‘This is so unbelievable. You did such an exceptional job putting all these pieces together. I will go down in the morning to the museum and give them the photocopies of this evidence. I think it’s a story that needs to be told, don’t you?’
After they had coffee, Sophie led Alex around the estate and showed him the route Marcus and Vivienne would have taken through the side bushes down to the water. As the sun started to set, they stood on the beach where, seventy-five years before, Vivienne and Marcus had stepped into a fishing boat to pursue a cause bigger than themselves.
‘You can’t imagine,’ said Alex softly, ‘what it must have been like to have the choices they had back then.’
Sophie shook her head, and gently he took her hand and she let him. She wasn’t sure what this was with Alex, but she wasn’t going to hold back. She was going to let it become what it would become.
They stood on the edge of the beach as the sun was setting over the water, and hungry seagulls circled overhead, dropping shells on the stones to crack open for their dinner. Out on the water, a couple of fishing boats were coming in with their evening catch, bobbing on the waves, the brass on their hulls glistening, reflected in the last rays of the day. As the wind whipped up, Sophie closed her eyes and imagined her aunt Vivienne standing on the bow of a fishing boat with Marcus, the man she loved, by her side, heading away across the water to her destiny.
Epilogue
6 June 1944
Marcus stood over the body of the love of his life, struggling to come to terms with what had transpired. Staring at the blood seeping from the wound in her head, mingled with the smell of cordite in his nostrils, it took every bit of his strength to stop himself from retching. There was only one thought that now gripped him, that dominated him: that there was no time to mourn. It had cost Vivi everything to do what she had just done, and now he had to do the right thing. He owed it to her. If he collapsed or broke down, her death would have been in vain.
But it nevertheless took every inch of his strength to turn and walk away from her, to not throw himself on top of her and gather her into his arms and hold her one last time while there was still warmth in her body.
As two guards carried her away, he knew with a vengeance what he needed to do.
Returning to his office, it was clear from the intelligence coming in that the Allies were on French soil and the landings in Normandy were in progress. Marcus became hyper-focused, continually pushing Vivi’s face from his thoughts when it goaded and tormented him, threatening to take him down into the darkest place of guilt and grief. Unlike his mind, Marcus’s heart was shut down; it was paralysed. But he used his detached emotional condition to throw himself into his work, fearlessly disrupting as many of the German responses as possible, and now he was reckless. He didn’t care if he got caught. All he wanted to do was honour Vivi’s memory by saving as many of the Allied soldiers as he could.
He didn’t leave the office for three days, only sleeping for ten minutes at a time when he collapsed across his desk with exhaustion. Then, on the third day, he returned home briefly to shower and that’s when he had found it. Slipped under the door of the apartment, a letter from someone he didn’t know addressed to ‘Claudette’. When he opened it he broke down. How he wished she could have read it. One of the members of the underground cell must have delivered it. After creating false papers for her they were the only ones that knew about Vivi’s past identity. He allowed the tears to slip freely down his cheeks as he read the impeccable handwriting.
Dearest Claudette,
I cannot tell you how often I have thought about you since we were jailed that night in Paris, and hoped with all of my heart that you made it out of France safely. When my family and I were arrested we were separated and didn’t know for a time if any of us had survived. I will not