The Ways We Hide

In September 1942, Fenna Vos works as the onstage assistant to escape artist Charles Bouchard at a Brooklyn theater, though she is secretly the mastermind behind every trick and prop in their act. During a performance, Charles deviates from the script for their grand finale, the Milk Can Escape, a stunt requiring escape from a sealed, water-filled container. He destroys the emergency ax, swallows the escape keys, and conspires with stagehands to fake a crisis, exploiting Fenna's genuine terror for dramatic effect. She retaliates the following night by debuting the Goblet Escape, a trick in which she picks six padlocks blindfolded while Charles remains trapped in a sealed crate, publicly showcasing her skills for the first time. Their backstage confrontation turns bitter: Charles dismisses her as "just" an assistant, and Fenna fires back that she could replace him with anyone off the street.

That evening, Christopher Clayton Hutton, a British official from MI9, a covert branch of Military Intelligence devoted to designing escape-and-evasion gadgets for Allied prisoners of war, follows Fenna home. Having bribed stagehands into confirming she is the creative force behind the show, he offers her a wartime position. Fenna declines but phones Arie Jansen, a childhood friend serving as a first lieutenant in U.S. Military Intelligence. The conversation is strained, and Arie hangs up. Devastated, Fenna goes to tell Charles she is leaving but finds him at a jazz club with another woman wearing the silk kerchief Fenna gave him as a symbol of their partnership. She accepts Hutton's offer the next morning.

The narrative shifts to December 24, 1928, in Eden Springs, Michigan, a copper-mining town. Fenna, nearly eleven, attends a Christmas Eve party for striking miners' children. Her mother died of scarlet fever when Fenna was a toddler; her father, a Dutch immigrant miner, is her sole parent. At the party, she meets Arie Jansen and gives him her wooden toy train, which contains a hidden compartment, after a bully destroys his toy airplane. Minutes later, a man falsely shouts "Fire!" in the crowded hall, and a stampede erupts in the narrow stairwell. Arie grabs Fenna's collar as they are swept into the crush. They survive by holding hands and controlling their breathing beneath layers of fallen bodies. Seventy-three people die, 58 of them children.

Fenna develops severe nightmares and claustrophobia. Arie begins visiting on restless nights, and they form a secret friendship. He gives her Houdini's Big Little Book of Magic, and learning sleight of hand becomes her lifeline. When Arie's family relocates for a factory job, Fenna's father dies of pneumonia ten days later. She is sent to an orphanage in Grand Rapids, where confinement in a dark cellar triggers a severe panic episode. She escapes by hiding in a laundry cart and reaches Amesboro, Michigan, where Arie persuades his mother to take her in. Over the following years, she works jobs in carpentry, lock-picking, and performance, staging public shows at a local junkyard with Arie as her assistant.

In their early twenties, a Houdini film screening shifts something between Arie and Fenna, and their relationship deepens into romance. He proposes, and she accepts. But the next morning, a mother soothing a crying baby triggers memories of the stampede: a lifeless mother in a yellow dress, her infant screaming above the crush. Fenna concludes she can never be a mother. Believing she would rob Arie of the family he wants, she leaves a farewell note and the wooden train on his pillow and flees to Chicago.

In late 1942, Fenna arrives in London and begins work at MI9 headquarters on the Wilton Park estate in Beaconsfield, designing escape aids: compasses hidden in buttons, silk maps sewn into jackets, and flight boots that convert into civilian shoes. She endures setbacks, including a soup-can prototype that explodes during a demonstration, charring an air commodore's office. In March 1943, she and her driver, Private Lenora Walsh, are caught in the Bethnal Green Tube disaster when a crowd crushes into a stairwell after mistaking an unfamiliar British rocket test for a German weapon. One hundred seventy-three people die. Fenna's trauma resurfaces, and she submits her resignation, but Hutton, hospitalized for a nervous breakdown, persuades her to stay. Her breakthrough follows: rigging Monopoly boards with silk maps, compasses, and real currency hidden among play money.

When Arie visits Wilton Park, he returns the wooden train as a gesture of closure. Shortly after, British intelligence reveals that Arie was dropped into occupied Holland to aid a Resistance cell. The cell was raided, one member reportedly killed, and Arie has been spotted alive but evading contact. Fenna volunteers to go in as bait. Her plan is approved, but Lenora warns that the escort agent, Bram, has secret orders to kill Arie.

Fenna parachutes into the Netherlands and watches from hiding as German soldiers execute Bram and the other agents. Alone, she makes her way to Utrecht, navigates checkpoints, and connects with a Dutch contact named Willem. After days of searching, she spots Arie crossing the cathedral square at night and follows him until he pins her at gunpoint.

Arie reveals the full truth. His sister Thea married a Jewish man, and the extended family went into hiding in the Netherlands. Arie transferred into intelligence to find them but was betrayed by a Gestapo informant. SS Major Ziegler executed Thea and the family before Arie's eyes, keeping only Arie's five-year-old niece Evelien as leverage. Ziegler forced a deal: Arie feeds intelligence in exchange for Evelien's life. Arie has been mixing truth with lies while planning to rescue Evelien and his wounded Resistance contact, Nel.

Fenna commits to helping. She obtains sleeping pills to drug Nel's night nurse, secures forged papers through Willem, and persuades a shipping agent named Brouwer to hide Arie and Evelien in a compartment on his delivery truck. On rescue night, Fenna is detained in a German roundup and forced to perform card tricks for SS officers, narrowly avoiding detection. At the hospital, Arie frees Nel, but a firefight erupts and Arie is shot in the arm. At Ziegler's home, Fenna enters alone and wins Evelien's trust with sleight-of-hand tricks. Ziegler returns unexpectedly and attacks Fenna. She stabs him with her knife; Arie shoots him dead.

They flee to a workshop as air-raid sirens provide cover. Fenna discovers Arie has concealed a second bullet wound in his side. That night they reconcile; Arie tells Fenna her departure years ago was not noble sacrifice but fear. She admits he is right and confesses her love. When she wakes at dawn, Arie is dead beside her, having bled out in his sleep.

Willem arrives with Brouwer's truck. Fenna carries Evelien into the hidden compartment, overcoming her claustrophobia by holding the girl's hand. They pass through checkpoints and eventually board a boat for a harrowing North Sea crossing to England. At a debriefing, Wing Commander Moretti—an RAF ferry pilot who had been secretly keeping watch over Fenna at Arie's request—reveals that Arie left a hidden message. Applying turmeric and rubbing alcohol to the back of her old farewell note, Fenna uncovers Arie's invisible-ink words: "I love you, Fen, with all my being. And I'll carry you in my heart forever."

Fenna brings Evelien to the Jansen home in Michigan, where Mrs. Jansen presents a family scrapbook containing photographs and mementos of Thea, Arie, and Fenna, acknowledging Fenna as family for the first time. By August 1945, Fenna has rebuilt her career as "Madame Vos," a solo escape artist, with Evelien as her backstage assistant. Charles Bouchard reappears with a peace offering, and they reconcile. As the curtain rises, Fenna steadies herself with Arie's remembered voice and steps into the spotlight.