Alistair, a cigarette between his lips, doodled at a table in a far corner, not allowed to offer comment. Each member of Dragonfly was to be given this spiel in individual briefings to allow them the opportunity to withdraw from their missions in private. She was the first to be offered the chance, since she was the first to be dispatched. The understanding was that she could simply get up and leave the premises—“fold your tents like the Arabs and silently steal away,” the SOE officer had quoted Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. A driver would take her back to Milton Hall and from there to London, where she could hop a flight back to the United States. Bridgette had glanced at her case officer and caught a look that made her think he hoped she’d bail out. As time had gone on during training, the whole team had begun to suspect that he regretted getting them into this mess.

But what was there to go home to? A job as a women’s buyer for the J. L. Hudson department stores in Detroit, Michigan? An empty house within spitting distance of the best friend who’d betrayed her? A tombstone engraved with the birth and death dates of Angelique Duvalier? Bridgette had arrived too late to celebrate her college graduation and twenty-second birthday with her grandmother. When the Greyhound bus had finally pulled into Traverse City and a taxi deposited her before the little house on Elmwood Street, a neighbor informed her that Angelique had been taken to the hospital because of chest pains. She lived two days after Bridgette made it home, the letter from the Office of Strategic Services still in her purse.

Disregarding her case officer’s look, Bridgette said to the SOE captain, “I’m in.”

The captain had then instructed, “Now go grab some sleep. You’ll need it. You’ll be taking off at twenty-four hundred—midnight.”