The smell and crush of passengers on the metro to the Place Saint-Michel to check the mural made Bucky recall his trip to Honfleur and the reunion with his father. It had been a time of both pain and joy, a space of a few hours locked forever in his memory. An old woman showed him into the room where the legend sat cross-legged in a chair, a heavily draped window behind him. Never would Bucky forget the moment that he first laid eyes upon Nicholas Cravois, the storied Black Ghost—his father. He wore a beard and was bonier than Bucky had expected. The hardships of war and guerilla life had worn his tall frame to a razor sharpness. It took a son to detect his own likeness, and he could see it in his father’s body structure and eyes with their chameleon irises and thick lashes. They had stared at each other in a moment of breath-held silence, and then the legend had risen and spread wide his arms. “You have your mother’s shy smile,” he’d said in French. “The rest I can claim. Hello, my son.”

“You were brave to come over here to do what you are doing,” his father told him later, even though he’d ordered Bucky not to tell him his exact mission and place of work. It was dangerous enough that he knew his son’s address.

“Not really. I came solely to find you. The rest is…incidental.”

“But equally as perilous and risky.”

“Like father, like son.”

“A pity,” he’d said with a smile that expressed both regret and pride. His father had questioned him about his home, his education, the sports he liked. “Tell me about your life,” he’d invited.

So, while hardened men strapped with guns had stood lookout at doors and windows, and the old woman in her faded kerchief and apron had slipped in silently to serve them a bitter tea, Bucky had covered the missing years in Oklahoma.

“You learned the truth of your mother and me when you were fourteen, so I understand from your aunt.”

“Yes sir. By accident.”

“Does your mother know that…you know?”

“No sir, and Aunt Claire has vowed never to tell her.”

His father had wanted to know if his mother was happy. “Content, I’d say,” Bucky had replied.

“Ah,” he’d said, nodding in approval. “That is good. Happiness is most often short-lived. Contentment is more durable.”

His father asked if his family knew where he was and what he was doing in France, and Bucky had said they’d been told only that he was secluded in a highly secret job for the War Department and could not be contacted. Aunt Claire had promised not to reveal to them that he was in France.