“How are you feeling?” the agent asked without taking her eyes off her task.

Estelle ignored the question. Mostly because she didn’t know how she was feeling and partly because she didn’t want to try to answer.

“Are you planning on using that at the Ritz?” she demanded instead.

Sophie shook her head. “No. I don’t need a rifle. Not for what I need to do.”

“Then why do you have it out?” Estelle had, apparently, also slept through Sophie entering her bedroom and accessing the room through the wardrobe. The thought of that was faintly unsettling.

“I’m cleaning it for you.”

“You don’t need to. It’s not mine. I don’t like guns.”

“Then why do you have it?”

“A…guest left it here.”

“I wondered. It’s French.” Sophie slid the bolt handle back with a smooth, practiced action. “Military issue, I think.”

“I suppose you do? Like guns?”

The agent shrugged. “They are another type of language to be studied and mastered. A combination of mechanics and intangibles.”

“Something else they teach you in spy school, I imagine.”

“No. Well, yes, they do teach you about guns, but I was already familiar.” The spy picked up the weapon, peered down the sight, and then put it back down. “I got my first gun for my eleventh birthday. It was also a bolt action. A twenty-two.”

“You got a gun for your birthday?”

“Actually, it was my brother who got the gun. I got a watercolor set. We traded because Will didn’t want the gun and I didn’t want the paints. They were gifts from an old family friend who still believed himself safe in his understanding of a world where boys shot guns and revelled in fisticuffs and girls painted landscapes and arranged flowers.”

“What?”

“My brother and I spent summers on the coast, and he and I used to pass countless days up in the fields and forests overlooking the sea. He would paint, and I would study or shoot. There is nothing more satisfying than pulling the trigger and watching a tin can jump off a distant stump in a cross-breeze.”

Estelle stared at the blond woman sitting at her table, wondering why she was telling her all of this. Or if anything she was saying was actually true.

“I eventually taught my brother how to shoot, though I think he learned to make me happy more than he did it for himself,” Sophie continued, seemingly oblivious to Estelle’s confusion. “Just like he learned to fly to make my mother happy. A useful skill set, my mother called it. She was, above all, a very practical woman.”

The pilot Sophie had spoken of earlier. The one who had been missing for three years.