"Are you angry with me?" She asked the question casually, as if she had no idea.

"When were you going to tell me?" I replied.

She looked away as she raised the glass to her forehead, rolling it above her closed eyes. Little beads of water fell onto her cheeks. Or were those tears she was trying to hide? Or worse yet, were there no tears, only English sweat and Egyptian water?

"It's too hot, Billy. Please."

"You used me. Then you played me for a sap."

"No. No, I didn't."

Maybe that was true. Sort of. I had been used so often in this war that maybe I expected everyone to take a turn.

"OK," I said. "You didn't use me. But you have been stringing me along, making believe everything was fine."

"Everything is fine. Or was, until you started behaving so poorly."

"I wish we could go back to how it was."

"We worked quite well together, didn't we?" Her voice was wistful.

We had indeed. Diana Seaton and I were both on General Eisenhower's staff. I was in something called the Office of Special Investigations. Not many people had heard of it, which was the point. The general didn't want anything that warranted a special investigation to get a lot of attention. That might hurt the war effort. But he did want things taken care of-quietly, if possible. That was my job.

Diana Seaton had joined the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry at the start of the war. Then she'd volunteered for the Special Operations Executive, the British outfit that sent spies and saboteurs behind enemy lines. She'd barely survived a mission in Algiers a year ago. After her recuperation, General Eisenhower had taken her on as a liaison officer at Allied Forces HQ in Tunisia. Maybe he did that because he needed another liaison officer or maybe because I was his courtesy nephew. It was hard to tell with Uncle Ike.