Former Lady Evelyn Hughes is new to New York. She's traded British espionage and wartime work for being a therapist. She's content with all of the red-tape to let her secrets stay buried in the past. When she hooks up with wartime veteran Benny DeMa...
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A/N: Annnnd we're off!! Welcome to the sequel to State of Grace, where Gracie Spaatz WILL in fact, make an appearance closer to the end. Welcome to a mostly happy post-wartime fic. To clear up any confusion, the ships are very confusing and all I'm gonna say is that if ever there was a codependent group of people it would be Evie, Paddy, and David—and then Evie and Benny added in. So NO, Evie is not in love with Paddy and vice-versa, but they're weird platonic soulmates. Please note that there will be flashback chapters every other chapter in this, getting into the SAS TV show and Evie's past. So please enjoy, and please let me know what you think!
Chapter Management: Chapter 1: Prologue/Welcome to New YorkChapter Text
Lady Evelyn Hughes, formerly Swinton, stepped off the boat to America and took it in with a deep and aching breath. Almost immediately, she regretted the decision. The smell of sewage had hit her nose quite strongly and she grimaced, pulling out a handkerchief and pressing it over her nose.
She may have smelled much worse, but that was during wartime. She didn't need to debase herself or subject herself to such horrors anymore. No more cutting brake-lines or rolling around in sand with a bunch of men, no more sharing trenches and cots, no more smell of gunpowder or sizzling flesh, and no more iron tang in her nose from too much blood.
No, she was a refined lady. Or at least, she used to be. Mostly, anyway.
Evie had already made her way through the Immigration Process. It had been speedlined by the British Government, who were all too happy to be rid of her after the war. It had been a nasty business that she had been involved in.
Nasty accidents. Nasty secrets. There was a whole wall of red tape that she'd never get through and that no one would ever be able to get to the bottom of—and her name had been redacted from any proper documents. To everyone else, she was just a widow. Lady Evelyn Hughes, widow of a soldier. Widow of a regular man, the average man, Daniel Hughes.
He had been no lord, he had held no title, no land, and had nothing really to his name. But they had been incandescently happy in a way that Evie had never experienced before she had met him.
Making her way through the city, Evie felt that her life was not in technicolor anymore. Rather, it was entirely in black and white now. Mourning black, though Evie would never be caught dead in it. If she was, she'd have to wear it for the rest of her life, given all that she had lost.
Evie had found a charming little apartment, and had already paid some people to get the entire place set up. Unfortunately for her, the people had also taken the liberty of placing plants on the windowsill. Upon seeing them, she just pinched her brow a bit. Every plant that Evie had ever owned always ended up wilted and dead before she could even water it. And if she had watered it, it was altogether likely that it would end up overwatered and still end up dead.
She was too used to the desert.
So it was no surprise when Evie turned off the fan in the apartment and just sank down on the couch for a moment.
Tomorrow, her job. The VA was in need of some wartime therapists. Evie was not, in fact, a wartime secretary, as her resume so suggested. But the VA administration had taken a look at her resume and stamped her through without much of an interview process. She didn't mind that.
She would be excellent at her job.
Men would wonder how she understood just what they were talking about. The sensation of a buddy dying in your arms. The grief that swallowed you whole like you were Jonah and it was the whale. The panic that filled your chest when you thought about dirt filling your lungs in the damn trenches. The way that the gun felt easier to hold in your hand than a baby did.
And she'd smile and grit through her teeth and cite that she had talked to enough men to understand.
She'd say that she had studied the effects of grief and trauma on the mind.
Evie had lived with it firsthand. It would all be a lie. There were moments where she preferred to sweat through the heat of the night and wake up panting for water just like she had in the desert. There were moments where she could only cling onto Paddy in the middle of the night, legs tangled together so tightly while they both raggedly breathed.
But that was then.
And she had left him behind.
Without a word really.
It had been cruel, but it had been the only thing that Evie could stomach. She had gotten the sinking sense, after pushing that professor to the brink and beyond, that if she stayed with the men of the SAS, if she let herself be entirely consumed by the war, no one would be able to recognize her by the end, least of all her.
And she had already lost herself so many times.
She thought, though, that perhaps if there was ever someone who could understand why she had left, it would be Paddy. Paddy had seen it all firsthand. They had had to live together to even function during those godforsaken years. The years had been awful. They had been awful together, bringing out the best and the worst of each other in the simplest and smallest moments.
Evie took out a cigarette and carefully lit it, her manicured red nails glinting in the dim light of the apartment. She took a long breath of the smoke, inhaling deeply.
Paddy wouldn't write her. She knew that he wouldn't. She couldn't write him either.
There were too many raw feelings that existed on the edge of her mind and on the tip of her tongue. For both her and for him. When violence was all that you could stomach and all that you had become, it takes someone really being able to see you to be able to get through it without giving up on yourself.
But at the moment, Evie did not want to be herself.
No, she wanted to be Evie Hughes. Simply that. Nothing more and nothing less. A psychologist and therapist. Not a wartime espionage agent. Not someone written out of every report like she was the British Empire's dirtiest secret. And maybe she was, given everything that she had done for them.
She'd get an ice cream, she'd take a smoke, she'd maybe even go on a date here or there. She'd smile, and she'd look pretty. And she'd try to forget the sounds of her husband's death that lingered in her ears every single day like the toll of a funeral bell that was looming ever and ever closer. She'd write down diagnoses and counsel and advise soldiers and ignore the advice that she was giving to soldiers.
Evie would be a shooting star, burning so fast against the night sky that she burned right out.
No one would be able to find her in America.
She had seen to that.
She had set up a PO Box so that any letters—and there were sure to be letters, letters from Johnny and Reg, Bill, and Jim, and Mike—and of course, David. She'd be surprised if he hadn't already written her a letter.
See, she hadn't been there when he had returned from the Prisoner of War Camp. And it had gutted her to do it. But she was not his Evie. And she could not bear to show her face after the thing that she had become in his very absence.
That part of her life now, it was all over.
But then again, is anything really over?
That same afternoon that Evie arrived in New York, Benny DeMarco arrived. Tired out. Determined for a fresh start. And even more convinced, as he sat next to his trusty dog, Meatball, that he desperately needed a dame, a good time, and a good drink. Not necessarily in that order.
The following that is about to occur is an account, taken from various records and witnesses, about the entwining of lives between Evelyn Hughes and Benny DeMarco. For their story is just beginning.
