April, 1942

My walk home and the minutes, hours, and months thereafter continued to perpetuate the dread that had settled into my stomach. My presence upon returning to the house hadn't eased my mother's frantic smoking and, when the bottle of gin had been released from the cupboard, I excused myself upstairs. She was angry, hands shaking, but I wasn't sure if it directed at me or the world around us.

Dad's eyes were haunted, showing a war and scars that I often forgot he had fought in. He never let the trenches show on his face, carved between his eyes and cheeks but now they were visible, harsh, and brutal. Sitting on the top of the stairs like I should have done on December 7th, I watched the eighth day of December slide into darkness and before long, December bled into January. None of this was supposed to be happening. none of it should have happened. The war, the fear, and my own Pearl Harbor continued into early spring.

My own Pearl Harbor proved to be the final blow to what little of a relationship I had with my mother, blowing it into smithereens. The tension and the suppressed emotion on both sides caught like pitch and it wasn't long until we avoided each other like the plague, not ready to send smoke into the air once again. I had never understood what my mother had done during those four years in Germany, where she had met Lawson, and where she had been given marring scars. I wasn't meant to understand, or even to know, as she kept everything under lock and key. The little pieces that I had was a tattered German primer, a hamsa that strung tight around my neck like a noose, and a codebook, stained and inscribed with the name of a girl I had never met: Sadie Goldschmidt.

Mothers, in my limited experience, were usually caring and nurturing figures. Warm hugs, soft handkerchiefs, and delicate hands. My mother wasn't like that. She was all rough, calloused hands and gruff words mixed with cigarette smoke and booze. My earliest memory is of listening to the door to our house shut and her keys hit the table. It was late, she hadn't come up to say good night and she was gone the next morning. On good days, when the raids had gone well, she slipped into my room smelling of speakeasy cigars and booze and said good night. When raids went south, I would listen for those keys to know she was safe. She was private, even to her own daughter. I knew she had grown up in Leipzig, Germany. I knew that she never called herself German. She was British, she said, or American. She didn't speak of siblings, she didn't speak of how she got to Britain. She didn't speak of a lot of things. For Miriam Carroll, the four years between 1914 and 1918 didn't exist, blotted from her mind and our family conversation.

The key to the secrets Miriam kept close to her chest wasn't found in my own home but in an escort to a door and the ringing of the telephone.

It was very rare that Lydia called me in my own home. We were friends of circumstance, brought together by family ties and the fierce poker competitions between my father and Aunt Mollie.

"Watch out," She started off, ominously. "Black suits left our place."

This was something Lawson and Dad had been warned of. Whispers of a new government branch, an intelligence office that would train and deploy agents had been a constant since December. it would only make sense that they would employ experienced agents to their offices. Lawson White was one of the best agents in Chicago, maybe even the Midwest. He had been interim director of the Chicago office and had, with Miriam, been on fire in the '20s, filling up cells nightly. Lawson White was good. Of course they would want him.

"What did he say?"

"He refused. Said they needed him on the home front." I could hear Lydia rolling her eyes. "Don't know why they even bothered."

"Lawson is one of the best. DC must have spoken highly of him."

It was more than that. I had been sitting on Lawson's words for nearly four months. He had walked me to the door, insisting he made sure I was safely down the street, as if I didn't live five minutes away. I had reached for the doorknob and he had grabbed my arm.

"Miriam didn't want you to know,"

"Then don't tell me," I had said. This man was the closest thing to family I had on my mother's side, a fixed point in my memory as a child. He knew Miriam's anger.

"She didn't want you to know because she didn't think you would ever have to see what she did,"

"What could she have seen?" I asked. "She lived in London during the war."

"We had to shut Clay up in his room so he didn't try and enlist right then and there. Anyway, " Lydia continued, ignoring my silence and plowing onward. "Just wanted to warn you. They'll be coming for Allen next."

"Right," I said. Of course they would be coming for us next. Of course they would come, the vultures in suits, to perch themselves on our sofa next but it wouldn't be my father they had come to collect. "Right, thanks."

I would later learn that the black suits belonged to representatives of the COI, known to me as the OSS. they were the final piece, the match to my oil spill. The doorbell rang and I opened it, the heat of the April day burning my cheeks.

"Is this the Carroll residence?"

Sometimes, when trying to chase sleep on the hard military cots or watching the lights of the German patrols flood in from the streets and reflect on the ceiling of my attic bedroom, I would imagine how different my life would have been if I had slammed the door in their harsh, cold faces.

"Allen Carroll isn't home," I had said, though I knew they weren't coming for my father.

"Virginia? What are you doing?" My mother appeared behind me and for once, I was relieved at her presence.

"Mrs. Miriam Carroll?" the first man said. "We've been sent to speak with you. You come highly recommended by Captain White."

Miriam had sat them down in our living room before I could blink, their foreheads glistening in the heat that was plaguing Chicago this April. I hung back in the doorway, gripping the newspaper I had been perusing in my palms. She had offered them water and as she went to retrieve the glasses, I glanced them up and down. She never welcomed strangers into our home so readily but these vultures must have meant something. They were almost too secretive, it was obvious. Black suits, one had a briefcase. Their hair was close-cropped and they held themselves like ex-soldiers, stiff as a board. Miriam returned before they noticed I had followed them into the room, and as she distributed the clear glasses of ice water with little lemon wedges, she beckoned me to sit down.

I slipped into the room and perched on the edge of the nearest armchair. One of the men, with steely gray eyes and harsh lines on his face, cleared his throat. "I'm sorry ma'am, but this is a confidential subject."

Miriam smiled a smile as icy as the now perspiring glasses of lemon water. "Captain Kingston, Virginia is my daughter. I can assure you that she is the face of discretion."

It was a promise to them but a warning to me. I stayed but I was quiet.

"As we said, you come highly recommended from Captain White," Captain Kingston said. "I confess, during our first sweep of the files we didn't find anything dedicated to your work."

"Your mother was a great informant in Germany during the Great War,"

"I wouldn't imagine so," Miriam said.

"Allow us to explain what we hope to achieve,"

"That won't be necessary," Miriam said. "I understand perfectly. We are in a war, Captain, and it isn't my first."

"She was infallible. When I met her in France in '15," Lawson had trailed away, his eyes glistening in the memory. "She was incredible."

"How did she get her scar?"

"Knife. Spa, Belgium."

"With the war in Europe, we were instructed to put together some experienced and trustworthy candidates to work with our new intelligence division."

Placing his cup on the side table, he extended a manila folder across the coffee table, saying. "With your experience, as detailed by Captain Laurence White in the Great War, you would, of course, be accepted without question. Inside this folder is the training and overview, detailed."

I glanced at the folder as Miriam withdrew a glossy paper that oozed authority. She looked down her nose at it, the same nose we shared, rather unimpressed. If this was the same offer they had made Lawson, Miriam would, of course, decline. Anyone with two eyes and a half a minute spent in Miriam's company could see she preferred running wild in Chicago.

"You are asking me to spy again?" Miriam asked

This didn't seem to register with their intelligence and discretion programmed minds. They stared, blankly at her for a few moments, trying to process the very Miriam way she had phrased it.

"Your mother entered the war as one person, Ginny. Who she is now is because of what she's seen."

"In a manner of speaking," The second man, dark hair, a shadow across his scalp, spluttered. "We prefer to think of it as an operative, carefully monitored by local chapters-"

Miriam cut him off with a hand, ceasing his chatter with the simple gesture. "My time in Germany was many years ago. I've already fought my war, sir,"

Miriam had prepared me for years, bullets and conjugated verbs marking her paranoia that one day, her war wouldn't be the last fight she had seen. While my father had been insistent, using prayer and wishful thinking to keep the failing diplomacy at bay, Miriam had known that being prepared for the worst would serve me better. I hadn't seen it then but now I did. I reached for the nearest object, something to hold as I reeled in comprehension. That day's paper was perched on the arm of the chair and I snatched it up, rolling it up tight as if swatting at my future would keep it at bay. My palms were so sweaty that I was sure if I dropped the paper, the headline would be stained on my hands, ink declaring war in the Pacific.

Lawson had shown rather than told of Miriam's time in the war. the pride and fragment of fear that had shown in his eye was enough to tell me that my mother had every reason to prepare me. I had never questioned why my mother knew as much as she did. She was Miriam Carroll and that was enough. I wasn't really her daughter, more of a doll. A protege to shape and mold. By sixteen I was her little agent. It was a testament to her own ability that she had taught me so much.

"We could use your skills, Mrs. Carroll,"

"I do not accept."

My mother had never been the most patriotic American. Miriam wasn't devoted to much of anything. The hamsa that had been given to me on my sixteenth birthday was not tied to a devotion or practice of faith. there wasn't an ounce of commitment to anything that walked the Earth in Miriam's bones except for the personal battle she waged in this city and her own mind. She was made to fight and yet she said her war was over. Her war was over.

Shit.

I had let the newspaper fall to the floor as the two representatives tried to plead with masculine dignity to the stonewall that was my mother.

"I'm sorry, gentleman," she said, not looking at all sorry. "I am retired."

"Great, now we are going back with one kid and no Carroll," the steely man mumbled under his breath.

"But I can offer you a replacement, to go in my stead." I gave her the barest shake of my head but Mom plowed on with the tact of a tank, ignoring my refusal.

"A replacement, ma'am?" The steely man looked at my mother in confusion who nodded, pleased.

"My daughter, Virginia."

They turned and looked at me. I tried not to look scared half-to death like I hadn't just been reading of the rising death count of US soldiers.

"We were told of you, ma'am," The dark-haired man said but exchanged a look with his companion. It seemed the wrong Carroll was better than no Carroll.

"She is fluent in French and German, a superb markswoman. I trained her in codes and hand to hand combat." Miriam said. "I taught her everything I know."

That seemed to win over the dark-haired one but Captain Kingston didn't seem convinced. I kicked the fallen newspaper under my seat and tried to sit tall under the steely-eyed gaze. I had been told my whole life that war would never find me, wrapping me in its cold clammy hands as it did now. Prayer and preparation didn't slow its course. Destiny didn't seem to care.

"Her father is Captain Carroll, of the 20th field artillery?" He asked. My fists curled tightly in my lap. I wasn't a prize-winning animal with a pedigree but he seemed satisfied to see me as such when my mother nodded.

"We'll have to discuss with our Commander but it is a possibility." Kingston turned to me, asking. "How old are you?"

I was seventeen but something in Mom's eyes made me change my response.

"Eighteen."

I would be. In June.

"Well, Ms. Carroll," the men rose, I followed suit, staring up at them as they towered over me. I felt very small, very very small. "We'll be in touch."

I shook their hands with my ink-stained palms.

"That is," the Captain turned before leaving. "If this is what you want?"

I wiped that morning's headlines off my hands and onto my pants. Duty, Sacrifice. That was all anyone talked about these days. Men, with less experience and training than I, were being killed. While I sat at home, with years of my mother's grooming and instruction, doing nothing.

"What did Miriam see? What did she do?"

"She saved lives, Virginia. Just remember that."

It wasn't nursing. It wasn't what I wanted, deep down. It wasn't my war but I could save lives.

I looked up at the man, the match to my tinderbox, and nodded. "That's what I want."