“Do shut up, Camden. My feeble feminine intelligence requires a bit of quiet for such tasks.” Margot read through the page and then let her eyes slide shut. Let the organization of it turn into numbers in her mind, let the numbers shift and slide until their patterns matched up with others.

When she opened her eyes again, she found Dilly to be the one wearing a smirk, directed at the grounded pilot.

Margot handed the paper back. “I believe it’s a variation of 2310. You’ll need to determine the variance, of course, but that seems to be its pattern.”

“Ah. Good man, De Wilde. You’ve saved me a few hours of trial and error.” He stepped back into the corridor with a mock salute. “Best of luck with your delinquent.”

“Much appreciated.” She turned back to said delinquent with raised brows. “Any questions before I go?”

He held up a pencil, bemusement on his face. “You’re a codebreaker?”

Not quite as insightful as the ones Drake tended to ask. But then, they were old friends, not identical twins. “Obviously.”

“But you’re a woman.”

“Excellent powers of deduction. What was your first clue?”

He sighed, and a fair bit of his bravado seeped out with it. He looked . . . tired. And maybe a bit broken.

Margot decided to take pity on him. A little, anyway. “It’s like this, Camden. DID will hire whoever can do the job. A banker. A music critic. A girl. A supposed criminal. It doesn’t matter what you were outside these halls. In here, all that matters is that you can do the job. So do the job. All right?”

He rubbed a hand over his face. “It’s been . . . a nasty week.”

“I imagine.” The papers hadn’t been very clear on exactly what he was being blamed for, but it involved the deaths of members of his squadron. That kind of horror gave a man an excuse for surliness. What she didn’t quite know was how to reach out to him through it.

Drake would know. He’d have a clever question to ask, one to poke through the resistance and get to the heart of the matter. The heart of his old friend.

All Margot could do was draw in a breath and say, “My mother died three weeks ago.”

He looked up, shoulders still stooped but combativeness gone. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

She heaved out the breath she’d drawn in, wishing for just a bit of Drake’s ability to communicate. “I didn’t say it for sympathy. Just . . . the work helps. Helps me, I mean. Maybe it’ll help you too. Give you something positive to focus on. A way to let go of all that nastiness, at least for a few hours at a clip.”

He leaned forward and rested his arms on the table. “Probably. But I don’t know that I’m ready to let go of it.”