Eileen hurried in just as Mike was paying the bill, saying, “Sorry, I was applying at Mary Marsh, and they kept me waiting.”

Mike read her the list. She shook her head decisively at each of the names.

“Okay, then, it’s Beachy Head,” he said. He hurried off to catch his ride. “I’ll be back before the fourteenth.”

So you can go to Coventry, Polly thought.

She had to keep him from doing that. Which meant she had to find Gerald’s airfield.

Over the next few days, she spent her lunch breaks going to Victoria and St. Pancras Stations to copy down two-word names beginning with B and P from the departure boards and her evenings incurring Sir Godfrey’s wrath by trying to get additional airfield names from Lila and Viv, but they were almost no help at all.

“We nearly always go to the dances at Hendon,” Lila said.

“There’s one on Saturday,” Viv told her. “You and your cousin could come with us.”

She nearly accepted. They could ask the airmen they danced with where else they’d been stationed. But she was afraid if they weren’t there when Mike came back, he’d decide to go to Coventry, which would be not only dangerous but pointless.

Because if Mike had found Ned and Verity and given them the message, that would mean Mr. Dunworthy had known for years that all this was going to happen and not only allowed it to but arranged it. Arranged for Mike to go to Dunkirk, for Eileen to go to a manor where the evacuees had the measles, had manipulated and lied to all of them from the moment they entered Oxford.

It’s impossible, she told herself.

But even as she thought it, she was remembering. He made me bring extra money, he made me learn the raids through December thirty-first. He insisted I work in a department store that was never hit during the entire Blitz. And if they had managed to get a message through, then he’d have known they were pulled out in time and that they weren’t in any actual danger.

But if Mr. Dunworthy had lied, then why hadn’t he sent Mike to Dunkirk in the first place instead of scheduling him to do Pearl Harbor and letting him get his L-and-A implant? And why had Linna and Badri been questioning everyone about increased slippage if they already knew about it?

Mike still wasn’t back by the twelfth, and they’d had no word from him. It hadn’t taken him this long when he went to Biggin Hill.

What if he went to Coventry without telling us? Polly thought, looking over at the lifts from her stocking counter, hoping one would open and Mike would emerge.

One of them finally did, but it wasn’t Mike. It was Eileen. “I came for two reasons,” she said. “I’m determined to have the name of Gerald’s airfield for Mike when he gets back from Beachy Head, so I came to tell you I’m going to go scour the secondhand bookshops for an old ABC or a book about the RAF or something with airfield names, and I wanted to make certain there weren’t any raids in Charing Cross Road today.”