The next day, Estella could hardly concentrate. She’d known that she couldn’t tell Alex about Xander at the party. It would be so unfair to him with Eugenie there, not to mention everyone else around, and, besides, she’d been unprepared, hadn’t known what to say. Not that she was any better prepared now. Thank goodness for Sam, who came over to the house to distract her. She could hardly brush her own hair, let alone look after Xander, so when Sam said he’d take Xander to the park early, would roll a ball with the little boy and give her some space to get dressed, she nodded.
At a quarter to nine, she was ready.
Alex arrived early, set himself up by an apartment building in the northeast corner, pretended to read a newspaper and watched the park.
Twenty minutes later, Estella appeared and his whole body contracted with pain. That she could look so goddamn gorgeous should be a crime. She was clearly flustered, her hair undone and loose, her dress buttoned incorrectly. His bones ached the way they did when something ominous was about to happen.
He saw Estella open the gate to the park with her key, saw her cross over to a man sitting on a bench, his back slightly turned to Alex, shielding something on his lap. Alex could tell that the man was Sam and the thing he was shielding was a child.
Estella sat down next to Sam and Sam looked up from the bundle on his lap, as if reporting something in the way parents did about their child. He saw Estella laugh, saw Sam put his arm around Estella’s shoulders and kiss the top of her head. Three people looking for all the world like a family.
Alex’s heart squeezed so hard he knew it had finally been wrung dry. He had to get out of there before they saw him. He’d received her message loud and clear—that she had a family and that Alex should forget all about her.
He never would though.
Estella reached out to take Xander from Sam. As she did so, the wind caught Xander’s hat, blowing it away. She whirled around to catch it and saw a man hurrying down the street, away from the park, a man she would have known anywhere.
“Alex!” she screamed as loudly as she could. “Alex!”
She raced out the gates but by the time she reached the corner, he was gone.
“Oh no!” she cried.
Then she heard Xander, toddling over to her, say “Maman?”
That one word made her suddenly see that she’d been wrong. Everything that she’d thought mattered, didn’t. Xander was the loveliest, happiest, most beautiful child regardless of the fact that he shared the same blood as Harry Thaw. With love and patience and kindness Xander’s principal family—Estella and Mrs. Pardy and Janie and Sam—had made sure that Xander would never be like Harry. Xander was his own person.
And the realization Estella had had at the party about Harry Thaw was incomplete. Yes, there was nothing left for Harry to destroy but she herself was destroying her future with Alex—the man she loved inestimably—before it could truly begin. The scruples and the shame should belong to Harry, not to her. Rather than protecting Alex when she’d lied to him and told him she’d made a mistake, she’d handed Harry Thaw another despicable victory.
She scrubbed her eyes with her hands. She’d never catch up to Alex. He knew better than anyone how to throw off a pursuer, how to hide. And she doubted he’d be back in Manhattan again for a long time. But that didn’t matter.
As soon as this damn war was over, she was going to take Xander to Alex and she was going to tell Alex how she had made a terrible mistake. Not in loving him, but in pushing him away. She was going to tell him that she still loved him. That she wanted to marry him. That she hoped, with every filament of her body and soul, that he loved her too.
So long as he survived the war.
Please God, she thought, you couldn’t be that cruel. Please let him live. Please let me give him the gift of Xander. Please let us be together at last.
Alex ran into Estella’s mother by accident in Marseilles. He’d never met her; Peter was the one who organized the minutiae of the safe houses. But when he saw a woman who looked enough like Estella, before he could stop and think, he reached out a hand to her and said, “Is Estella Bissette your daughter?”
She looked at him blankly and he knew she was doing what she’d learned to do. To answer all questions with a “no” in order to keep out of trouble. He gave her his code name and only then did she follow him to a café where they sat down in the back, watching the German soldiers. They spoke in French because at that moment he was French, an essential munitions worker on his lunch break.
She stared at him across the table with eyes like Estella’s, although less brilliant and more haunted by what she’d seen.
“I know your daughter,” he said.
“How is she?” Jeanne asked.
“Happy,” he said. “But sad about you.”
“You’re the one who’s been passing on her letters. You care for her.”
He didn’t bother to reply. He knew it was written on his face; everything he felt for her. But also the heartbreak and the loss. Still, he tried to deflect. “Estella is a friend. She loves another man, Sam, and has a child with him.”
“She’s found out about Lena?”
He nodded again. “If you have a letter, something I can take back to her, it would make her so happy to hear from you.”
And so she began to write, two pages of small, neat writing. When she was finished, she handed it to him.
“You should read it,” Jeanne said.
He shook his head but she only said, more urgently, “You should read it.”
So he did. He read of how Harry had raped Jeanne too. And Alex knew, he goddamn well knew, how stupid he’d been. Thinking Estella had left because of him. She’d left because she couldn’t face herself.
He closed his eyes and remembered how sick she’d looked that afternoon in the Hudson Valley when she’d told him she was sorry. He was sorry. A thousand times sorry. If only he’d not given up and run back to Europe. But now it was too late. She’d married Sam. She had a child.
“I’ll make sure she gets it,” he said in a voice barely controlled as he opened his eyes.
“Thank you,” Jeanne said before she left.
That night, he heard from Peter that one of his passeurs in Marseilles had been taken, tortured, and killed. He knew straightaway who it was.
It took three months for that letter to pass through hands Alex trusted and to find its way to New York and to Estella.
She opened it with surprise when she saw Alex’s familiar handwriting on the envelope. She tore it open. Inside was a short note, as well as another envelope, addressed to her in her mother’s hand.
Alex’s note said: I’m so sorry, A.
And she knew that it meant her mother had died. All she could do was read her mother’s letter and cry, I’m sorry, Maman, I’m so very sorry.