“I’m trying to imagine what a girls’ night out for these two might have looked like in Paris before the war. Like a Thelma and Louise meets Moulin Rouge. Less the car off the cliff, of course, though they probably kept Brad Pitt for fun.” She laughed lightly and stole a glance at him. “Think your great-aunt might have joined them?”

“God, no. Sophie Seymour was nothing like that,” Gabriel told her, thankful that Lia could find the humour in his idiocy. “She was a serious scholar, not a socialite. Wasn’t exactly known for her charm and congeniality,” he said ruefully. “She was a keen student of sciences and maths, and an utterly brilliant linguist. Spoke a half-dozen languages by the time she was twelve, a half-dozen more by her twenties. She fully intended to be the first woman to earn a full professorship at Oxford. Her job at the Foreign Office was to have been a step toward that dream.”

“She sounds driven.”

“She was. Intimidated the hell out of most men her age, as my grandfather tells it. She never married, never even dated, according to family lore.”

“She still must have broken a few hearts if she was this beautiful,” Lia murmured, eyeing the photos.

“She told more than a few people that she didn’t see the value of courtship with men who didn’t see the value of her studies.”

Lia smiled. “I think I would have liked this great-aunt of yours very much. It’s sad that she died before she could realize her dreams and ambitions.”

“My grandfather thought the same. He looked for Sophie for a long time after the war. He refused to believe that she had abandoned her post, knowing just how important that job was to her. He wanted so badly to believe that she had somehow survived.” He leaned his hip against the edge of the table. “He never found anything, of course, but my grandmother said his search saved him.”

“What do you mean?”

“He was injured and struggled with depression when he came home from the war. My grandmother was a nurse, hired to help with his recovery, and she ended up helping him search for his sister. It gave him purpose again, she said.”

“And they really found nothing?”

“Nothing. But hope is a powerful motivator, especially when it’s mixed with stubbornness. I can’t imagine how devastating it would be to return home to find that everyone you loved was gone. I can’t imagine anything worse than losing your family without ever having a chance to say good-bye. If I had been in my grandfather’s shoes, I would have done the same.”

“It sounds like your family is close.” Lia sounded almost wistful.

“We are. Probably too close for my sister’s liking at about the time she started dating. The Spanish Inquisition had nothing on us.”

“Your poor sister.”