The room tilted and spun, and I had to squeeze my eyes shut. It wasn’t the wine this time.
Delphine.The word written on the back of the photograph. The photograph of my grandmother, standing in the rubble of a bombed city, wearing her velvet jacket.
“The photo,” I said. “It said Delphine on the back.”
Garrett explained for Jean: “Someone showed up at Grace’s shop asking questions. He had a photograph of her grandmother from the 1940s, with ‘Delphine’ written on the back.”
“Could Delphine be a place?” I asked. “A town, maybe?”
“No.” Jean shook his head. “It’s a French name. Fairly common for women of that era.”
I gripped Jean’s arm, as though he could reveal all of Didi’s secrets for me. “Is the letter writtentosomeone named Delphine? Orfromher?”
Jean studied the translation again. “Neither. It seems to be giving the egg to this person to keep it safe.”
I pressed my hand against my stomach, trying to settle the churning there. None of this made sense. My grandmother’s name was Diana. My brother and I had called her Didi.
Not Delphine. Never Delphine.
I stared down at the letter even though I couldn’t read a word of it. The paper was so thin. So fragile. My grandmother had kept this secret inside a hidden thing for decades. Had she told anyone? Had she told my father, maybe? No, if she had, he wouldn’t have given me the egg along with her costume jewelry. He would have done something with it himself.
Why, Didi? What were you hiding?“What if Delphine was her?”
Garrett and Jean both looked at me.
“What if Diana wasn’t her real name? What if she was Delphine, and she... became Diana?”
Jean was quiet for a long moment. “Did you know her parents?”
I stared at the letter. At the name. “She was an orphan.”
“Jean.” Garrett’s voice was low. “Do you know anyone who can help with this? Another expert or someone who can provide some more context? It has to be someone you trust not to spread the word about what we’ve found.”
“Bien sûr, I do.” Jean set his phone down. “A colleague who specializes in lost Russian artifacts. I can email him tonight. I suspect he’ll be very interested in what we’ve found.”
Delphine.
Didi, was that you?
Chapter 20
Galahad
“She never said a word,”Grace said, pivoting at the dresser and heading back toward the window. “Not to my dad, not to my mom, not to me. I told her everything—every crush, every bad grade, every stupid mistake I ever made. And she—” She gestured sharply. “She kept this whole other person locked away.”
The guest room was small, but a hair larger than our hotel room in Paris. Window, dresser, chair in the corner, bed. Grace had already changed into flannel pajama pants and a worn T-shirt, her face clean, and her hair pulled back.
I checked the window lock. Scanned the tree line beyond the glass. Nothing moved. Jean’s property was quiet. Not the kind of quiet that preceded danger or an attack, but the kind of quiet that normally settled my nerves.
“But also—” She stopped mid-pace, turning to face me. “If she was Delphine—if she was in Marseille during the war—what was shedoingthere? The letter said she was brave. Someone gave her a Fabergé egg because she was brave. What does that even mean? Did she lie about being in London? Did she lie aboutthe Blitz? Were any of those stories real? Was she even British to start with?”
She’d had three glasses of wine, but she wasn’t wavering or acting drunk. Her speech wasn’t slurred. She should have been ready for sleep. Instead, she was pacing the length of the room as if she might vibrate out of her skin.
“We’ll know more tomorrow.”
“I know. I know we will. It’s—” She started pacing again. “My whole life, I thought I knew her. And now there’s this whole other story, this whole other person, and she’s gone, and I can’t ask her, and?—”
“Grace.”
