Page 103 of Beehive

The Cold War was just beginning, and our roles in it were far from over.

1. The Assistant to the President was retitled to Chief of Staff in 1961 by President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

2. The Secretary of War role was replaced by the Secretaries of the Army and Navy by an act of Congress in 1949. Both were subordinate to the newly created Secretary of Defense.

3. While commonly attributed to Stalin, many point to an essay by Kurt Tucholsky, a German journalist, in a column published in 1925, in which he wrote, “The war? I cannot find it. You, the war? Who knows it? You know. A million deaths is a catastrophe: only a hundred thousand is a statistic.”

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Epilogue

We slept in the next morning. Our flat in Paris was cozy and certainly met our humble needs, but the pillows and sheets of the Willard sucked us into their silky embrace. When the valet arrived with coffee and a selection of pastries and other breakfast treats, I was sure I’d died and gone to heaven.

“Oh, God, try the cherry one,” I mumbled.

Crumbs flew out of my mouth and all over our perfectly pressed bedding.

“Were you raised in a barn?” Thomas snarked. “Did no one teach you it’s bad manners to eat in bed, especially when someone else is still in said bed?”

I washed my bite down with the best coffee on the planet and waggled what was left of my cherry something-or-other. “You’re not ‘someone’ in my bed. You’remyThomas. That means I can say or do anything, with or without you here, and it’s legally acceptable . . . and binding.”

“Again with ‘legally’?”

“Okay, fine, the law isn’t on our side. Way to be a downer on my Danish.”

He laughed. “First, that isn’t a Danish. Second, wanting to keep the sheets clean isn’t being a downer; it’s planning ahead.”

Now it was my turn to cock a brow. “Plan ahead? How so?”

“Well, Iplanto get you naked later and spend the afternoon teaching you who your daddy is. I would prefer to do that without the risk of bits of muffin crawling up my crack.”

The next spray of pastry that showered the bed was a deluge compared to the few scraps from before. I barely kept from tossing coffee everywhere, too.

Thomas shook his head, climbed out of bed, and padded into the bathroom. I was fairly certain he muttered, “Barbarian,” on his way by.

The sound of paper sliding under our door drew me upright.

“Shit. Not again,” I muttered, setting my coffee on the nightstand and wrestling with the sheets and comforter. Each seemed determined to keep me securely within their grasp.

A copy ofThe Washington Tribunehad been shoved through the crack separating the door from the floor.

I released a breath I’d been holding. “Huh. Breakfast and news. I’m liking this place more by the minute.”

“What’s that, babe?” Thomas called from the throne.

“Nothing,” I said. “They just delivered a newspaper—”

A few heartbeats ticked by.

“Babe?” Thomas called. “Everything all right?”

“Uh, yeah. So, um, it looks like Truman has balls after all.”

The toilet flushed, and Thomas appeared in the doorway. “What happened?”

I closed the gap between us and held the paper out, still folded, the top of the front page facing him.

Soviets Slaughter Innocents

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