Now that Jack was nearly four years old, he slept in a real bed like his brother, all tangled up in sheets and blankets. Iris straightened them around his warm little body. He wore a soft, blue-striped union suit, his favorite. Mrs. Betts must have fished it out of the clothes hamper for him because Mummy and Daddy were away at a party. Iris smoothed his damp hair from his temple and imagined him sipping his warm milk, swinging his legs on the chair at the kitchen table next to Kip, while she and Sasha sat in their taxi and edged through the drizzle and the traffic toward the Desboroughs’ flat in Eaton Square.

Kip, on the other hand. Kip lay like a vampire in a coffin, perfectly straight, nose pointed to the ceiling, blankets tucked around him. Kip was the sweeter one, the sensitive one, who shared Iris’s artistic spirit but liked everything just so—soldiers lined up on the chest of drawers, clothes folded and ready for the next day—that kind of thing. Iris didn’t understand, but she went along with it. Last year he’d decided warm milk before bedtime was for babies, so he drank cocoa instead and instructed Jack on the finer points of the milk mustache.

Sometimes, when the boys lay asleep like this, tranquil as they never were when awake, Iris would stare at them and not quite believe they were hers. Eight years! How could eight years pass so quickly, and yet seem like forever? Iris felt like a different person now. She’d lived an entire lifetime in those eight years. That sense of holy purpose she’d felt in Rome—that determination to belong to Sasha, whatever the cost, and his determination to belong to her—where had it gone?

Jack stirred under Iris’s hand. She stepped back and held her breath, waiting for him to settle. In the shadows, she couldn’t see his shape, let alone the colors of him—his pale hair, his round, rosy cheeks. But she knew they were there. She knew the essence of both boys in her marrow. Her second child, her baby born in Ankara as the Allies marched through Normandy. She had suffered two miscarriages between Kip and Jack, and Jack’s birth had been even more harrowing than Kip’s. Nearly thirty-six hours before they wrestled him out into the world, and all that time Sasha was away on some special mission, she didn’t know where, because she’d gone into labor two weeks early.

No more babies, Sasha had said, when he stood by her bedside a week later—home at last—pale and disheveled—and Iris had agreed.