Page 113 (1/2)

You’ve done your part, she tells herself

More than your part

Home to her mother and father Home to New York Home to life and ease and safety and maybe romance andBut it’s all sour, all of it i home until

Until what, Rainy?

Until what?

Until she no longer feels eo home yet, not like this, not as this person

She can’t go home, because there are no Krauts in New York The Krauts are here The Gestapo is here

A staff sergeant calls her na past her to turn a plush wingback chair that slides easily on the polished parquet floor

The ceiling, far above her, is an arch painted with cherubs andNo doubt it is a scene froy and doesn’t care to try The headquarters is in a seized villa of sonificence, and this is but one of the many floridly decorated rooms

A captain sits to her left, a colonel sits behind the desk, and it takes her a few beats before she realizes he is her former captain and now Lieutenant Colonel Herkemeier He still checks his creases compulsively, but his eyes are full of coret? Pity?

What is clever, kind, decent Jon Herke when he looks at her?

There is also a fe notes, seated tactfully off to Rainy’s right and slightly behind All three are Arence, but Rainy quickly intuits from the start that her mission is seen differently from here than it was from Colonel Corelli’s office in New York

She gives a stripped-down account of her ht fro on She wants to give a controlled, professional account, knowing that if she lets herself becoo on

Even the barest retelling takes her thirty mi

nutes, all accompanied by the scratch of pencil on paper froin