“No. I was seconded to the OSS, under diplomatic cover. Liaising with our agents in Germany. Assisting the escape lines, that kind of thing. I assumed you knew.”

She sat up. “How should I know if you didn’t tell me anything?”

“Because you couldn’t possibly think I’d spend the war stamping passports, for one thing.” He had a towel wrapped around his middle. His cheeks were pink and smooth; his hair combed back wet from his forehead. He took a cigarette from the pack on the dresser and lit up. “For another thing, I wasn’t exactly home every evening at five o’clock, was I?”

“You were so happy in Zurich. I always wondered why.”

“Because I was doing something worthwhile. Fighting the right side.”

“Is that all?”

He sucked on the cigarette. “And I had you. And Kip. What more could a man ask for?”

“It’s funny, because I was miserable in Zurich. I had all those miscarriages, and you were hardly ever home, and the war was going badly.”

He stared at her a moment and turned to the window, where the children screamed around the lawn. “All’s well that ends well, I guess. We ended up with Jack, didn’t we, and we won the war. And now you’ve got me around all the time, a nice well-trained husband.”

“No, you’re not. You’re a drunken, irritable, unreliable husband who’s probably having an affair.”

Sasha spun around. “What the devil? Who’s having an affair?”

“With that blond woman. Fischer. She keeps popping up, doesn’t she?”

“Damn it, Iris. I told you, it was over long ago with her. I—”

He bit off the sentence cleanly, like the snip of a pair of scissors. Iris stared back at him. She took in the instant of panic, the flexing around the eyes, replaced almost—but not quite—immediately with a look of bored irritation that was the screen for something else, the search for something to say.

“You’re talking nonsense,” he said.

“She’s your contact. Your handler.” Iris spoke slowly, because it was so much to understand—everything—the history of the past eight years—of her marriage, of Sasha—all rewriting itself inside her head.

Outside the window, a cloud shifted. Sunlight poured through the glass and turned Sasha to gold. His hair, his skin. The angle of the light had some strange effect on his eyes, turning them an extraordinary pale green. He didn’t move, not a flicker. One hand held the towel in place at his waist.

Iris waited. He had to tell her—he had to say the truth or not. She wouldn’t do him the favor of dragging it out of him.

“Was,” he said, in a voice so low, Iris strained to hear it. “She was my handler, in the beginning. She recruited me.”

“I’ll bet.”