The Secrets We Kept

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussions of sexual assault and rape.

Irina does her first trial run as a covert message carrier at the Town & Country Lounge of the Mayflower Hotel. She avoids dressing in a way that would draw too much attention to her, though her meager means make it hard to look like a woman who would frequent that bar. Irina deviates from the script, however, in requesting a little red sword for the olives in her martini. She follows the instructions to sniff and turn a white rose that’s on the bar as a signal. Fifteen minutes after the nondescript man at the bar leaves, presumably after delivering a letter into her Chanel bag, she too leaves, boards a bus, and surreptitiously pushes the bag over to another covert agent, verified by a coded conversation.

After work each evening, Irina meets Teddy by the reflecting pool to receive further training. She feels comfortable around him, as she would toward an older brother. He, too, learns about her life and converses in Russian with her mother. She learns that he believes art and literature can be tools to spread democracy and fight the Soviet Union, which suppresses some of its best artists.