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“Carter, get in here,” Jack hollered from the open door of his office.
Peggy stood and straightened her skirt as her so-called colleagues tittered like schoolboys whose classmate had been called to the headmaster’s office. Jack stood waiting impatiently in the doorway, but Peggy took her sweet time crossing the bullpen. Despite what her co-workers thought, she hadn’t done anything lately to incur his wrath, at least nothing he’d know about. No, Jack wanted something and Peggy was going to make him work for it.
Jack ushered her to a chair and shut the door behind them. He settled into his seat behind the chief’s desk like a king upon his throne. Peggy frowned as she caught a glimpse of gold on his finger. She could see Jack as the sort to wear a class ring or maybe a signet, but that looked suspiciously like a wedding band. He couldn’t have called her into his office just to brag about getting married, could he? No, that was too preposterous. She hadn’t even heard he’d been engaged.
“To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“Got a mission for you.” Jack held out a file and it was all she could do not to snatch it. He was better about giving her real assignments than Chief Dooley had been, but that wasn’t exactly saying much.
Peggy skimmed through the file. It was a dossier on a couple: Ira and Irene Copernicus. He was a physicist and she a mathematician. They had met working on the Manhattan Project during the war. Now he was a professor at Columbia and she, like so many women whose work had been vital to the war effort, had been relegated to the role of housewife. It was all very interesting, but didn’t tell her anything about her promised assignment.
“The boys in D.C. intercepted a Russian communique,” Jack explained when she looked up from her reading. “Something about Copernicus being a prime source for intel on the bomb. They haven’t got anything out of Copernicus yet, and the S.S.R. intends to keep it that way.” He flashed her a showman’s smile. “Pack your bags, Carter. We’re moving to Queens.”
“We?” Peggy raised a skeptical eyebrow. “As in you and me? Together? Undercover? I don’t recall Chief Dooley—”
“Chief Dooley had a real wife to go home to and we both know you’d eat those boys out there for breakfast,” Jack said, nodding towards the bullpen with a jerk of his chin.
“And yet somehow you think you’ll survive?” Peggy reposted automatically before the first part of Jack’s sentence caught up to her. “Wait,” she said, her eyes narrowing suspiciously, “what do you mean ‘wife’?”
Jack boyish smiled morphed into a smirk. “Well, we can’t exactly move into the suburbs as good friends. What do you say, Carter?” He fished something out of a desk drawer and tossed it to her. “Will you marry me?”
It was a jewelry box. Of course it was. Inside was a plain gold wedding band, a twin, she realized, to the one already on Jack’s hand. Peggy sighed. “Oh, if I must,” she said and slipped the ring onto her finger. It was not a particularly good fit.
The team discussed the mission over Chinese take-away at the house the following evening. Peggy had imagined that they’d be bunking down on the floor of an empty home and so was rather shocked to find half the office unloading a lorry when she and Jack pulled up that morning. The rather shabby assortment of battered furniture and mismatched kitchen wares must have taken ages to assemble. No wonder they had all laughed when Jack called her in to propose. Everyone had been in on the mission but her. Bastards, all, of them, but especially Jack. She should have been involved from the word go. At least then she’d have been able to pick the sofa. This one was positively hideous and reeked of old people.
The house itself was quite nice and very modern. So modern, in fact, that the paint seemed to have barely finished drying on the walls. It was the sort of place which would have been perfect for a family just starting out. The kitchen, dining room, and parlor were spacious and the small water closet off the kitchen was a nice touch. There were three bedrooms upstairs and either of the smaller two would make a darling nursery. The rest of the houses on the half-finished block had a similar look, not precisely cookie cutter, but definitely of a type. They had been lucky that the house directly across from the Copernicuses had been finished just in time for them to buy it.
Peggy twisted her ring round and round as she listened to Jack rattle off assignments. Fidget, fidget, fidget. She’d been just as bad with her engagement ring when Fred had proposed. In a week, she’d be used to it, but for now it felt like an albatross around her finger. She forced her hands flat to keep from fiddling with it, only to find herself absently tapping it along the edge of the table.
“—Ramirez will have the professor from noon until he comes home. And, of course, I’ll be covering him nights and weekends,” Jack wrapped up.
“And I’ll be doing what exactly?” Peggy asked. If he even suggested that she’d be keeping house, she would kill him. She would slam his head against the table and drown him in a chipped bowl of wonton soup.
“You—” Jack pointed at her with his chop sticks before spearing a fried dumpling, seemingly oblivious to the danger he was in “—will be keeping an eye on Mrs. Copernicus. Keep the Ruskies from using her as leverage.”
Peggy nodded. She could work with that. “I’ll see if I can’t become friendly with her,” she said as she helped herself to some lo mein. “If someone has approached the professor, there’s a good chance he might have mentioned it.”
“Not if our spy looks anything like that Dottie Underwood,” chuckled Agent Ramirez, giving Agent Reece a playful nudge. He and Jack exchanged knowing smirks.
Peggy rolled her eyes. Honestly, men could be such children. “Then Mrs. Copernicus will likely think he’s cheating. Either way—”
“Either way, we get intel. Carter, you cozy up to her,” Jack ordered like it hadn’t been her idea in the first place. “See what you can find out.”
She resisted the urge to say something sarcastic. At least he was listening to her. That was progress, she supposed.
They cleared the table together after the other agents had gone. Peggy assembled the left-overs while Jack made a pile of the rubbish.
“I noticed you fiddling a lot with that ring,” Jack said.
“Just checking to see if it’s turned my finger green,” Peggy quipped as she checked to see what was left in the last container. There was barely a mouthful of fried rice lurking at the bottom. She shook it into her mouth and tossed the empty container onto Jack’s rubbish heap.
Jack pressed his hand to his chest and shot her a mock-wounded look. “It’s solid gold, sweetheart. Nothing but the best for my fake wife.”
Nothing but the best? Oh, really. Peggy favored him with a derisive snort. How then did he explain that horror of a sofa? She scooped up the left-overs and set off in search of the nearest refrigerator.
Jack came scurrying after her with an armload of rubbish. “So you’re not thinking about how you could have been doing this whole marriage thing for real?” he asked as he dumped it into the bin.
Peggy shot him an incredulous look. “With you?” She has just gotten to the point where she could more or less stand to work with him. She’d be lucky to make it through this fake marriage without shooting him, let alone a real one. “You can’t be serious,” she said, and headed back to the dining room to gather up the dishes and avoid this nonsense.
Unfortunately, the nonsense possessed legs of its own. Once again, Jack came after her.
“Obviously not to me. I just mean—” he shrugged “—you could have been Mrs. Captain America. Don’t tell me you haven’t been thinking about it.”
Peggy stiffened under the white-hot lash of rage. “Mrs. Rogers,” she snapped. She had been in love with the man, not the character. To suggest otherwise was an insult to them both.
“Okay.” Jack backed away with his hands raised. “Mrs. Rogers.” He lowered his hands and looked at her with something like concern. “I just mean—” he sighed. “It must be hard for you, thinking of what could have been.”
She blinked and blinked again. Was that a stab at empathy? From Jack? Ham-fisted thought it was, it was surprisingly disarming. Somehow, she found herself speaking of the very thing she’d been trying to avoid.
“Steve and I—” Peggy swallowed the sudden lump in her throat “—we were never officially—”
Jack took her hand and gave it a squeeze, sparing her the need to continue. She and Steve had had an understanding, but there had been no promises made beyond the date at the Stork Club they’d both known he was never going to make. Peggy took a deep breath and pushed through the heartache.
“I was engaged once,” she said with forced lightness, pulling her hand from his. “To someone else. At the start of the war.”
“What happened?” Jack asked with a concerned and sympathetic expression. Clearly he expected the worst, as thought she was a walking romantic tragedy. He reached for her hand again, but Peggy deftly avoided it to start piling up the dirty dishes.
“We called it off.” She shuddered to think of where the world might be if she’d gone ahead with the wedding. Certainly Jack would be dead several times over and New York would likely be in shambles. “For the best, really.”
Jack shook his head. “if you say so,” he said, and abandoned her to her task.
The photograph of Irene Copernicus from the file did not do her justice. The hair that had looked merely brown in the black-and-white image proved to be a rather fetching shade of auburn. That did not stop Peggy from instantly recognizing her when she appeared at the front door with a gaggle of other women shortly before the next day’s lunch.
“Welcome to the neighborhood,” said a statuesque blonde with a baby in a pram. “We thought we’d come to introduce ourselves and treat you to lunch.”
She made a small gesture and the youngest of the bunch, a mousy girl quite round with pregnancy, sprang forward with a casserole dish. Mrs. Copernicus held up something which looked suspiciously like pie.
“I’m Alice,” the blonde continued. “These are Agnes, Mary, and Irene.” She gestured first to a woman in her late-30s, then the girl with the casserole, and lastly Mrs. Copernicus. “And this is little Billy.” Her voice went higher pitched as she bent over the pram to made kissy faces at her son. Peggy couldn’t help but smile as he cooed back at her.
“It’s lovely to meet you. I’m Peggy Tompkins. Please, do come in.” She pushed the door open wide and wished to God Jack had let her pick the furniture or at least find matching dishes.
All in all, her new neighbors seemed like a decent lot. Alice was a bit of a queen bee, but she meant well and didn’t say a word about Peggy’s battered tea set. Mary was a nervous little thing, apparently suffering quite terribly from morning sickness, an ailment Agnes has happy to offer advice on. She herself was on her third pregnancy. Her two girls, ages 8 and 5, attended the local public school which was, Agnes assured her, one of the best in the district.
By the time they were divvying up the pie, Peggy felt like she had learned everyone’s life story. Everyone, that is, except Irene. Her gaze wandered listlessly as the other women chatted and she barely said a word. She mostly just picked at her food and sighed like a woman bored with life. Befriending her would be trickier than Peggy had thought.
Then Alice gave her the perfect opening. “It must have been hard, leaving your family to come all the way from England to be with your husband,” she said.
“A bit. Honestly, the worst part has been the boredom.” Irene twitched at that and Peggy pressed her advantage. “During the war, I was a code breaker,” she said, Official Secrets Act be damned. Irene’s head snapped up and she really looked at Peggy for the first time all afternoon. She now had Irene’s undivided attention. The gambit had been worth it.
“I’m glad the war is over,” she said without letting even a hint of her satisfaction leak into her voice, “but, in a way, I miss it. I miss the, I don’t know, the sense of—”
“Purpose,” Irene jumped in. “You miss the sense of purpose.”
“Yes,” Peggy said with a slightly relieved smile to play up their mutual understanding. “During the war, I had purpose and now?” She shrugged and waited to see how everyone took it.
Irene just nodded, but Agnes and Alice exchanged a worried look. “I know it’s hard now, dears,” Agnes said, reaching out to squeeze their hands. “I promise you’ll feel that again once you start having children.”
“And in the meantime?” Irene asked, her lips twisting in a bitter line.
Peggy caught her eye and flashed her a wry smile. “One way or another, if you and I want purpose, it sounds like we’re going to have to make it ourselves.”
“Honey, I’m home!” Jack breezed into the kitchen through the back door while Peggy was in the middle of making dinner.
Peggy attempted to drill through his skull with the sheer force of her glare. “You do recall I’m not your actual wife,” she said acidly.
“Jees, Carter,” he said, hanging up his coat, “learn to take a joke.”
“A joke?!” Peggy resumed mashing the potatoes with considerably force than necessary. “Is that what you call the heap of dirty clothes you left on the lavatory floor?”
She’d gotten spoiled living at Howard’s apartment, she really had. Not as much by the maid who came once a week, as by having a roommate who actually cleaned up after herself. Jack, meanwhile, left flecks of hair and shaving cream all over the lavatory sink. In the two weeks they’d been living here, he hadn’t washed so much as a single dish.
But the thing that really got her goat? She knew he was perfectly capable of looking after himself. Well, she doubted he could really cook, but he could certainly do his own laundry. He was always so well turned out at the office so, unless his mother was driving down from Connecticut to wash his skivvies every week, he damn well knew how to use a washing machine. That he thought he could just dump it on her simply because they were living together was a hundred times more enraging than being forced to play secretary at the office. It was all she could do to restrain herself from ranting about it when she met the neighborhood ladies for lunch. They wouldn’t have understood. After all, a wife was expected to do her husband’s laundry.
Jack certainly expected her to do his. “I figured, since you were here—” he shrugged.
Peggy slammed the masher on the counter, spraying bits of potato everywhere. “I’m here doing my job which, incidentally, does not include scrubbing your underthings.”
Jack’s gaze flicked from her face to the masher and back again. “Okay, okay,” he said in tones normally reserved for calming snarling dogs even as he attempted to surreptitious back out of the room.
“And speaking of doing my job,” Peggy caught him before he could make his escape, “I’ve managed to wrangle us an invitation to dinner at the Copernicus’ tomorrow night. So why don’t you do your job, and bring home some listening devices from the office?”
“Anything else?” he asked sarcastically.
“A bottle of wine. Red. Preferably French and definitely dry.” Peggy lifted the lid on the boiled cabbage to see how it was coming along. “I will be making pie for the dessert.”
“Sure I shouldn’t just swing by a bakery? Wouldn’t want to distract you from your job,” he said snidely. “Maybe I should start getting take-out every night so you don’t have to do anything too wifely.”
Peggy slammed the lid back on the pot. “Or maybe, you could remember that I’m supposed to be your partner and start pulling your weight around here.”
It was a struggle to keep her voice level, but her mother had raised an Englishwoman. That she was somehow responsible for everything around the house was infuriating, but yelling about it wouldn’t help. Raise your voice arguing with a man and you had somehow already lost.
“I am a highly trained federal agent. Your colleague. Not your wife and not your housemaid.” She stalked forward with each word until she had him forced up against the wall. “Do. Your. Own. Bloody. Laundry.”
He worked his jaw and her eyes narrowed. Her hands curled into fists as she waited, no, itched for him to say something, anything, which could justify a blow to the face. They stood staring at each other for what seemed like a small eternity. Then he nodded sharply and walked off without a word. His footsteps thumped up, then back down, the stairs. Arms full of dirty laundry, he made his way to the basement washing machine with his head held high.
She may have gotten what she wanted, but there was still a part of her that longed to punch him. Needless to say, dinner was rather tense.
By contrast, dinner the following evening was a smashing success. The Copernicus’ house was laid out much the same as their own. It only felt smaller due to the sheer number of books. Lovely, leather-bound volumes stood straight as soldiers in their built-in bookcases while their shabbier cousins sprawled across every available surface. Dime store thrillers mingled with theoretical physics. There was no system of organization Peggy could detect. No wonder the neighborhood ladies never met for lunch here. A jumble of notebooks and pencils was heaped upon the sideboard as if dumped there to make space at the dining room table.
What Irene lacked as a housekeeper, she more than made up for as a cook. Her pot roast was delicious and paired perfectly with Jack’s wine. Peggy attached the bug to the underside of the table in between bites.
All throughout the meal, Jack tried to subtly press Professor Copernicus about any Russian contacts. Either the man was an actor worthy of an Oscar, or he’d barely even heard of Russia. Irene, on the other hand, looked increasingly disconcerted at Jack’s line of questioning. After an hour of fiddling with her necklace and squirming in her seat, she practically fled into the kitchen at the first opportunity.
Her offer to assist with the post-dinner coffee rebuffed, Peggy took an opportunity to peruse the notebooks on the sideboard. They were filled with mathematical calculations written in a neat, spidery hand. If only she’d thought to bring a camera pen so she could have the scientists at the office take a look at them. They could be related to the bomb, but, for all she knew, it could be calculations of batting averages.
“Is this yours?” she asked the professor, holding it up so Jack could see.
His eyes widened as he took it in, although she doubt he understood it any better than she did.
“Gosh, it look so complicated,” Peggy gushed in her ditziest voice. Men like Copernicus loved to talk if they thought they could educate you. “Maths was never my strong suit.”
“Really?” Irene appeared in the doorway with a tray of coffee and dessert. “I thought there was a lot of math in codebreaking.” There was more than a hint of anger in her voice. Did she think Peggy was flirting with her husband, or was she annoyed by her playing dumb? “It’s mine, by the way,” she added, setting down the tray.
Peggy set the notebook down and resumed her seat. “True, maths play a part,” she helped herself to a cup of coffee and made a production of doctoring it as she talked, “but my expertise is in linguistics.”
“Peg’s a real whiz with languages,” Jack jumped in to back her play. “French, German, Russian . You name it. ”
Russian. Irene flinched at the word. This was the moment they’d been waiting for. The hunt was on, her blood was up, but Peggy couldn’t run her down like a hound with a fox. This required delicacy. She shared a look with Jack and he gave her the nod to go ahead.
There was no sense in rushing. Peggy took a sip of her coffee and added a jot more cream. “I tried to find a position as a translator when we first moved to New York.” She shook her head and sighed dramatically. “No one wants to hire a married woman.”
“Can’t take a job away from a man with a family to support.” The sheer bitterness in Irene’s voice startling, but not unwarranted. “At least that’s what Columbia said when I applied there.”
Jack and the professor exchanged the pained look of men who desperately wanted to defend their sex, but knew that now was not the time. At least, not if they didn’t want to spend the night on the couch.
“You too?” Peggy asked with a sad smile. “Perhaps we ought to form a club.”
Irene snorted, but then her expression turned thoughtful. “Funny you should mention that. The new librarian—” She broke off, her eyes going wide. Had she had an epiphany about her librarian friend or simply realized that she had said too much?
Peggy leaned forward, ready to pounce. “Yes?” she asked eagerly.
Perhaps too eagerly. Irene blinked and her pleasant hostess mask was restored. “She’s someone you should meet,” Irene said and jammed a fork-full of pie in her mouth. The hand holding her coffee cup shook slightly as she raised it to drink. “This is delicious, Peggy. You must give me the recipe,” she said in a transparent attempt to change the subject.
Peggy and Jack exchanged a look. They’d let this go for now, but they wouldn’t forget.
“It’s Irene,” Peggy said the second they walked back through their own front door. She mentally laid out her reasoning like ammunition for the coming battle.
“Obviously.” Jack disarmed her before she could even line up the first shot. He hung his coat and hat, then tugged the empty pie tin from Peggy’s unresisting hand so she could do the same.
Peggy stared dumbly at him. This was not how she had imagined the conversation going. She would insist it was Irene. He would say something asinine about no one wanting anything from housewives. Then she would bombard him with proof until he surrendered to her way of thinking. She wasn’t sure where to go from here.
Jack frowned at her dumbfounded expression. “I’m not an idiot, Carter. A brilliant, under appreciated woman recruited by the one person who recognizes her genius? It’s you and Howard Stark all over again.”
Peggy swallowed her instinctive protest and took off her coat instead. As much as she’d like to deny it, she was self-aware enough to admit just how much ego and boredom had played into her desire to help Howard. “Very perceptive, Chief Thompson. Now what do you intend to do about it?”
Jack sighed. “I’m not sure.” He raked a hand through his hair and began to pace. “Everything points to her, but…if we’re wrong…and I pull the detail off Copernicus…”
Peggy settled on the sofa to watch him go. There were times she doubted if Jack was really suited to leadership. He had all the ambition and political connections for it, but when it came time to make a decision he tended to, well, dither.
“There’s no need to decide right this moment,” Peggy said, taking pity on him. “Let’s listen to the bug while we mull it over.”
They’d set up the receiver on the coffee table before heading out earlier. She turned it on now and was rewarded with the faint sound of distant voices. She adjusted the volume until they could hear clearly. The tension drained from Jack’s shoulders as he settled on the sofa beside her.
Over in the Copernicus house, they were cleaning up. Dishes clinked in the background as the professor talked. “—Pushy, but I see why you like her,” he said.
Peggy closed her eyes and tried to picture herself in the room. Irene was stacking pie plates and coffee cups on the tray to take them back into the kitchen. Her husband was there too, maybe watching, maybe helping. One of them dropped a handful of silverware onto the tray with a metallic clatter.
“Did Jack ever say what he did?” Irene asked. “I don’t remember.”
Metal chimed against ceramics as someone lifted the tray.
“Chief of—” The professor’s answer trailed off into oblivion as the conversation moved into the kitchen and away from their bug. Peggy wished she’d had an opportunity to plant more than just the one under the dining room table. Who knew what they were discussing over there?
“Well, we know they think we’re pushy,” Jack said after a full minute of silence from the other house.
“They think you’re pushy,” she teased. “He liked me.”
He opened his mouth to respond only to fall silent at the sound of approaching footsteps.
“I take care of you, don’t I?” demanded the professor, his voice growing louder as he came back into the dining room.
“That’s not the point, Ira,” Irene said tiredly. There was a prolonged rustling as she pulled off the tablecloth and a muffled thump as she dropped it to the floor. “It’s not about money. I just want to feel like I’m doing something important again.”
There was an extended pause during which the professor failed to say anything. Peggy tried to imagine the scene. Had he taken Irene into his arms to comfort her? Walked off in a fit of pique? Lost the power of speech? There were too many options to choose from.
“Help me take the leaf out,” Irene said after a moment.
Peggy’s breath caught in her throat and Jack shot her a questioning look. There had been a leaf? Who put a leaf in the table for just four people? More importantly, where was this leaf in relation to where Peggy had been sitting? Where had she put the bug? She closed her eyes and prayed as they worked the leaf free with a series of thumps.
Then, just when she thought they were in the clear, the professor asked, “Hey, what’s that?”
Her heart sank.
“Oh, shit!” Jack shot to his feet. What he hoped to do, Peggy had no idea. She closed her eyes and pressed her knuckles to her lips. She couldn’t believe how badly she had fouled this up. If this operation failed, if Russia, or worse, Leviathan wound up with the bomb, it would be on her.
The sound from the bug grew muffled. Peggy waited with baited breath as Jack paced like a caged animal. Abruptly, the sound came back with the roar of a waterfall. No, not a waterfall. A kitchen sink.
“Peggy, is this you?” Irene asked in a breathy whisper that sounded more like a breathy yell on their end thanks to her proximity to the microphone. “I hope it’s you. I—“ She took a deep breath. “The library. Monday afternoon. Two o’clock. Be there.”
The roar of the water grew louder and then cut out with a horrid squeal. The sound of static filled the house
The team staggered their arrivals at the library beginning a good hour before the appointed time. Peggy and Jack came first, just another young couple looking for books together. She had visited the library before while watching Irene, but she had no idea which librarian was the new one. She picked the one who reminded her most of Dottie Underwood and struck up a conversation about cookbooks while Jack wandered off to get the lay of the land. Agent Ramirez arrived ten minutes later and Agent Reece fifteen minutes after that.
Peggy was still chatting with her cut-rate Dottie Underwood when Irene came in at four minutes to two. She couldn’t have looked more suspicious if she tried, clutching her notebook, her eyes darting this way and that. Her gaze snagged on Peggy and something in her shoulders relaxed. Her mysterious librarian friend appeared at her side as if summoned by magic.
She was not who Peggy had been expecting which was, she supposed, rather the point. Dowdy, plain, and running slightly plump, she would be absolute rubbish at seducing Howard Stark, but she was just the sort another woman would confide in. The perfect person to recruit a bored housewife. Peggy was after them like a shot as the spy pulled Irene back among the stacks.
There was nothing quite like the hunt to get one’s blood pumping. The air seemed to hum as she darted down the adjacent isle. The team moved in wordless concert, surrounding their prey like a pack of dogs. Jack encircled from the right, Peggy the left, while Reece and Ramirez blocked any hope of escape to the rear. Peggy reached a break in the shelves and crouched, gun drawn, waiting for Jack’s signal.
Irene and the spy were engaged in a tug-o-war over the notebook. “I don’t feel comfortable with this,” Irene said, pulling it closer. “You’re a foreign agent.”
“What does that matter?” the spy demanded, yanking the notebook out of Irene’s hand. “Your own nation doesn’t appreciate you.”
“Oh, we appreciate her plenty,” Jack said, stepping into view, gun drawn, in a fit of truly masterful timing. Peggy was at his side a second later.
The spy turned to run, only to freeze as Reece and Ramirez materialized out of the stacks behind her. She looked frantically back and forth between them. Dottie would have tried fighting her way out, maybe even killing them in the process, but not this one. She just glared sullenly as she complied with Jack’s order to put her hands over her head. The whole thing was almost anticlimactic really. The notebook fell to the floor as Jack yanked the spy’s arms behind her back and cuffed them there.
“Mrs. Copernicus,” Jack said, turning to where she had pressed herself up against the shelves, “once again you have the thanks of a grateful nation.” He tipped his hat to her. Irene breathed a sigh of relief as he hauled the spy away, the other agents trailing in his wake.
Peggy holstered her gun and bent to pick up the notebook. She gave Irene a good looking over. All her early nerves seemed to have melted away. She smiled like a cat in the cream.
“You do realize we’re going to have to take you in for questioning?”
Irene nodded. “I figured as much.” She smiled despite the hours of interrogation she had to look forward to. “I’m glad I was right about you.”
“Me too,” Peggy agreed, “bit it was an awfully big risk if you weren’t.” What if the spy had been the one to plant the bug, or someone else entirely? They wouldn’t have been here and she would have been forced to hand over nuclear secrets.
“It really wasn’t,” Irene said with a laugh. She pulled the notebook from Peggy’s hand and opened it to a recipe for pot roast.
The next 24 hours were a blur of interrogations, paperwork, and terrible coffee. They interviewed everyone: Irene, the other librarians, and, of course, the spy herself. They’d very nearly gotten somewhere when the boys from D.C. swooped in and laid claim to their prize. Peggy sat slumped at her desk and watched them go, feeling drained and more than a little grubby.
“Come on,” Jack said, shaking her shoulder. “I’ll give you a ride back to the house. We can sleep and get packed up.”
Peggy looked around dazedly as she got up. “Should we take Irene home as well?” She hadn’t seen the other woman in a few hours. A horrify thought occurred to her. “She hasn’t be arrested, has she?” Irene had, after all, conspired with a foreign agent. The team from D.C. might somewhat less understanding of her reasoning behind that than they were.
Jack shot her a concerned look. “Jees, Carter, how tired are you? I sent her home hours ago.” Ever the gentleman, he helped her with her coat and steered her towards the lift. “Don’t worry about Irene. The way I hear it, there’s talk of giving her a medal.”
“But not a job.”
It was a statement, not a question, and Jack didn’t even try to deny it. The grateful nation was happy to fob her off with a shiny bobble for her efforts, but not the one thing she wanted. Couldn’t take a job away from a man with a family to support, even if she’d be better at it. Peggy sighed and rubbed her forehead. She’d put a word in with Howard. He always did fancy clever women.
They drove through Manhattan in silence. Peggy leaned her head against the cool glass of the window and let herself drift. Jack tapped his fingers absently on the steering wheel. They were half-way across the Queenstown Bridge before she realized he wasn’t wearing his wedding ring.
She slipped her own off her finger. “I suppose you’ll be wanting this back.” Her hand looked strangely naked. Somewhere along the line, she’d gotten used to it. She could make out the faintest of tan lines around where it had been.
Jack snorted. “I’m surprised you didn’t just chuck it at my head the first chance you got.”
“We have been a bit busy,” she pointed out. Peggy turned the ring over in her hand. She’d had an opportunity to wear one for real once, but she’d turned it down. “Do you know why I broke things off with Fred?”
Jack studied her for a long moment before remembering to watch the road. “Ah, no. Why?”
“I’d been tapped for the S.O.E. I realized I couldn’t do that and be his wife at the same time.” She had loved Fred, she really had, but she’d loved being herself more. Strange how a man could be a husband and an agent, but not her. “It doesn’t seem fair, does it?”
“No,” Jack frowned, “it doesn’t. You realize, they wouldn’t have let Mrs. Steve Rogers work for the S.S.R. either.”
Peggy gasped as the words hit her like a blow to the solar plexus. Whenever she imagined a life with Steve, it was always a sort of continuation of the war, the two of them fighting side by side forever. In her fantasies, he never questioned her right to be there. For all the flack she’d gotten as a single woman at the S.S.R., it never even occurred to her that they might not let Captain America’s wife stay on, but Jack was right. They wouldn’t have.
“I’m sorry he’s dead,” Jack said, “but I’m glad you’re here with us.”
She had no doubt he meant it and that was the worst part. “Oh, shut up,” she snapped, and chucked the ring at his head.