“I’m very sorry.” Margot slid to a seat on the bench. “My father died not long before the war began as well. I still miss him. Every day.” She missed him every time that she picked up pen or pencil, let the numbers flood her mind, and used it to turn an encoded message into plain script. Every time she drew out a notebook in their flat and set to work on a theorem. Every time she read a newspaper and looked for secrets hidden within, though she well knew there was no one to plant them for her now.

He’d be proud of her. Proud of what she did. Perhaps he was looking down on her from heaven and smiling . . . but it wasn’t the same. She hated that she’d never get to show him all the discoveries she’d helped make, the codes she’d helped break. She didn’t get to come to him in joy whenever a codebook was recovered from a sunken U-boat or German agent. He was so much a part of who she was. And yet he was gone.

She shook herself. “But I have Maman still. Sophie De Wilde—I think you’ve met her? And my brother, Lukas.”

“Oh, yes, she’s been very kind.” Dot opened up her lunch sack. Then paused. “Wait. Lukas De Wilde? The violinist? I’ve a recording of him!”

Margot smiled and reached into her own bag. “Yes. He came to Wales with the orchestra in the first days of the war, to help raise money for the Belgian Relief Fund. Now he stays here in London to be close to us, rather than touring with the others. Well, and because his wife’s family is here.”

“He’s so very talented. And how lovely that you’re all together.” Dot pinched a bit of crust from her sandwich and tossed it to a flock of pigeons.

A waste of precious grain, Maman would say.

But the pigeons needed to eat too. Margot tore off a small piece and sent it to them as well. “Does your Spanish family ever visit you here?”

The young woman’s laugh didn’t sound very amused. “Oh no. Never. Abuelo never leaves his house in Bilbao, and he is all the family my mother had. I have an aunt though, on my father’s side. Aunt Millie. We lived together until just recently. That bombing in Poplar shook her far too much, and she finally fled for the countryside. So it’s just me here now. Except for when Drake is on leave, of course.”