So her ex-husband and best friend listened with a heart gone cold when she told him that she was flying to Paris the following day, the city of her nightmares and aborted youth. She had not wanted him to worry when she missed their Sunday phone call that weekend. During their marriage, she’d mentioned her special friend who’d been reported executed. She had been a part of the OSS group in which Bridgette had served but never elaborated on. He and Bridgette had been married when she came back from their reunion in New York City wearing a small dragonfly tattooed over her left breast, right over her heart. “Don’t ask,” she’d said, and he never had. He figured the tattoo had to do with “the boys” and the old man she called “the major” that she’d gone to meet. Steve approved of their close and abiding ties. Bridgette needed a family.

“So even if she is alive, what if the woman you remember has changed and…she doesn’t feel as warmly about you after all these years?” he said.

“Then she won’t show up at the café,” Bridgette said.

Point taken, Steve thought. She’d always been one step ahead of him in the rationale department, but he still didn’t want her to go. “Yeah, but to go back to that city, Bridge… Do you know what you’re risking?”

“I do,” she said.

“If she’s still alive, can’t the boys bring back the information that will put you in touch with her again anywhere but Paris?”

“They could do that, yes.”

“Then why the hell are you going?”

“To go forward, Steve, sometimes you have to go back,” she said.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED

Paris in September. Warm days, cool nights, sublime sunny skies. It was the Paris of his mother’s time—more modern, of course, but the magic that was the city of Monique Barton’s growing-up years had been restored. Bucky especially noticed the flowers. They were back in parks and on street corners and balconies, in the bicycle baskets of cyclists and the mesh bags of shoppers, explosions of intensely hued cosmos, Japanese anemones, dahlias, and the last of the season’s roses, a stable landscape around which the renewed, chaotic, glorious energy of Paris swirled.

Intent on his mission and destination, Bucky took in the differences between the Paris he’d left and the city to which he’d returned with only a cursory interest. Now, like then, he wished to find his father. His first stop after settling into his hotel in Passy-Auteuil was the villa of his aunt. He would visit Madame Dupree and the boardinghouse later, if they were still there. Now, like then, Aunt Claire did not know that he was in Paris. In fact, Bucky felt himself not that much changed since the last time he’d pressed the bell of her house.