What if it had continued on, on to this very day?

I looked at Colin as we walked in companionable silence away from the Tower, his hands stuck comfortably in the pockets of his Barbour jacket, his dark blond hair damped with wet, his Wellies comfortably smeared with mud and dead leaves. He looked every inch the English country gentleman, straight out of an issue of Country Life — or Joan’s magazine, Manderley. The thought of Joan brought to mind, with renewed clarity, her enigmatic words in the ladies’ room of the Heavy Hart.

“Why do you not like to talk about what you do?” I asked, all in a rush. Blunt — but maybe blunt was what was needed.

Colin looked down at me in surprise. He maintained his casual pose, hands in the pockets, shoulders slightly forwards to accommodate my lesser height, but I didn’t miss the glaze of wariness that settled over him.

“What d’you mean?” he asked, with studied ease.

“I found the piece of paper under your desk. About the gold souk — and the guns.”

Colin’s eyes closed in an “Oh, shit” expression. “So you know.”

“Well, between the paper and all your books, I put two and two together. I heard Joan saying something in the ladies’ room the other night,” I added, by way of explanation.

Colin’s hazel eyes shifted sideways, towards me. “I gather she wasn’t complimentary.”

“No,” I said apologetically. “But Sally defended you.”

Colin scuffed his already scuffed Wellies through the withered winter grass. “I should have mentioned it to you before, but I don’t usually like to talk to people about it.”

That was much better than “Now that you’ve found out, I’ll have to kill you,” or whatever the British equivalent of the witness protection program was. I didn’t even know if the British had an equivalent of the witness protection program. I tried to envision myself trying to blend into Nowheresville-on-Thames under an assumed name and failed miserably.

“I can see why you don’t like to tell people,” I said understandingly. “That would kind of jeopardize your position, wouldn’t it? If people knew.”

“Jeopardize my position?”

“You know,” I said, waving my hands in the air. “Give the game away. I mean, I always wondered how James Bond did his job when everyone knew who he was.”

“That’s a good point, I suppose,” he said, in that way people have when you’ve just said something that’s so off the mark, it might as well be in Sanskrit, but they like you, so they want to make something positive out of it so they can give you the credit you both know you don’t deserve. “And it would certainly be an interesting twist on the theme. But I think the reader should know who the main character is, even if the villains don’t.”

Now it was my turn to look at him as though he were speaking Sanskrit. “The reader?”

Colin shrugged self-deprecatingly. “Potential readers, then. I’d like to think I’ll have them eventually.”

Was he talking about his memoirs? “I thought you didn’t want to publicize what you do,” I said, in what I thought was a reasonable tone.

Colin smiled down at me, looking disconcertingly boyish for an international man of mystery. “Well, I’ll have to publicize it eventually, won’t I? At least, if it all goes well.”

“Your mission, you mean?” I ventured.

Colin looked at me in confusion. “My novel,” he said, as though that were self-evident. “I suppose you could call it a mission, but I think of it more as a vocation.”

“Your novel?” The word tasted like a foreign object on my lips. “But what about — oh! Then all those books — the travel guides . . .”

“All research. For my spy novel. But if you didn’t know about the novel, then . . .” His face was a mirror of my own, bearing an identical expression of horrified comprehension as each of us realized just what the other had been talking about all this while.

I could feel my cheeks go a deep, painful red.

Colin rubbed two fingers against the bridge of his nose, as though trying to clear his head. “So when you saw the books and the travel guides, you thought . . . you didn’t really think” — he seemed to have trouble getting the words out — “that I was a spy?”

“Only for about five minutes,” I muttered.

A snorting noise erupted from Colin’s nostrils. It sounded like it couldn’t decide whether it wanted to be laughter when it grew up.

“What was I supposed to think, with strange men getting murdered in the gold souk?” I demanded spiritedly. “And there was Joan making cryptic comments in the ladies’ room and you not wanting me to get too close to the family archives. You have to admit that it makes a certain amount of sense.”

“What did you think, that we had a spy empire?” choked Colin.

“Not an empire,” I said sulkily. It wasn’t that ridiculous. Okay, maybe it was. But it was his fault for being all strange and cagey about the family history. “Maybe just a very small spy dukedom.”

The amusement faded from Colin’s face as the implications sank in. “You really believed it, didn’t you? I hope you didn’t think you were dating the Purple Gentian,” he said sharply.

“I don’t see you in any knee breeches,” I retorted.

“I’m not my ancestors,” he warned me. “I’m not some sort of — Errol Flynn on a rope.”

“You really didn’t like that movie, did you?” I mumbled inconsequentially. “I know that. I wouldn’t want you to be one of your ancestors. If you were, you’d be dead.”

That one caught him up short for a moment. Folding his arms across his chest, he asked challengingly, “Are you disappointed that I’m not the spy you thought I was?”

I scowled at him. “Honestly?” Really, men could be such babies. “I’m relieved. I wouldn’t know the first thing to do with a spy. I was completely freaked out by the whole idea. Do you know the hours of sleep I lost because of that damn piece of paper under your desk?”

“Is that so?” He was still standing in the classic male pose of aggression, arms crossed, legs spread like Errol Flynn on the deck of a pirate ship, but I could see his elbows begin to relax, like cookie dough going soft at the edges in the oven.

Seeing my chance, I sailed into the offensive. “And what’s the deal with people calling you from Dubai at three in the morning?”

“Dubai? Oh.” Understanding dawned. He must have found just the missed calls when he woke up that morning, without having realized there had been predawn alarums. “Did that wake you up?”

“What do you think, Sherlock?”

Looking harassed, Colin ran a hand roughly through his hair. “That was a friend from university. He works in Dubai now. Great crunching numbers, but has some difficulties calculating time zones. I just visited him there,” he added unnecessarily. “On a research trip. For the book,” he emphasized.

Okay, I got it, I got it. As far as I was concerned, though, Mr. Selwick still had some explaining to do.

“Why didn’t you just tell me about the book?” I demanded. “Instead of being all cloak and dagger about it?”

“What would you think of a grown man quitting his job to write a novel? It’s a bloody cliché.” There was no mistaking the cri de coeur; the man was so full of angst, he resonated like a tuning fork.

My irritation washed away, subsumed in a tidal wave of intense protectiveness. I wanted to yell at all the other children in the play yard and make them play nicely with him. I could feel myself beginning to ooze sympathy like an underdone soufflé. “It could have been worse,” I said bracingly. “It could have been pig farming.”

“Pig farming?”

Oh, right. Colin hadn’t been there for that spies/sties discussion. At least now I knew I hadn’t been going crazy. Joan had said spies. She had simply meant fictional ones.

“At least writing is a nice, clean job,” I said, warming to my theme. “And so nicely portable, too.”

“You don’t think I’m crazy?” he asked guardedly.

“Only in a good way,” I assured him. “Anything creative is probably a little crazy. But that’s what makes it interesting. And if you have the wherewithal to do it, more power to you.”

“Thanks,” he muttered, shoving his hands in his pockets. “I think.”

“No, really,” I said, more earnestly this time. “I think it’s splendid. And I want to hear all about it. But why didn’t you tell me?” Rather than letting me jump to insane conclusions, I added silently. Fortunately, he chose not to bring up that bit.

Colin shrugged. “It just seemed a stupid thing to do, leaving a good job to have a go at a novel. A pipe dream.”

“But it’s your pipe dream. And if you actually do it, then it’s not a pipe dream anymore, it’s a career. Writing a spy thriller certainly makes as much sense as what I do,” I said encouragingly. “It will probably sell a lot better.”

“If it sells at all,” he said.

“What made you decide to do it?” I asked curiously. “That had to be a hard decision to make.”

“I’d always wanted to. It seemed so irresponsible, though. But then Dad died, and everything seemed” — he held out both hands palms up — “different,” he finished flatly. “Everything was different.”

I nodded furiously, keeping my mouth shut, trying to channel sympathy and understanding and encouragement without saying anything, even though, when it came down to it, I knew I couldn’t really understand. I could only guess at what it must be like to lose a parent, and to lose a parent relatively young, in a lingering and unpleasant way. I’d never dealt with cancer close up, but it didn’t seem a friendly way to go. At least not for the children and loved ones who were left behind.