Or perhaps he would have. Perhaps he’d have asked Talbot out to dinner, and exactly the same thing would have happened, with Talbot the villain. Or perhaps Talbot would have gone to that dance they never got to and met a GI who promised her nylons, and he’d made a date with Talbot for that day, and she’d asked Fairchild to drive to Hendon in her place. And she and Stephen had fallen in love on the way to London, and they’d have had a wartime wedding and lived happily ever after.

Fairchild could just as easily have driven him through Golders Green or down Tottenham Court Road and they’d both have been killed, Mary told herself. And either way, you can’t change the outcome. If you could have, the net wouldn’t have let you come through.

But just because historians couldn’t affect events didn’t mean they should intentionally create problems, so she made certain she was unavailable when Stephen rang up, spent her off-duty time away from the post, and volunteered to go after the supplies the Major constantly wangled out of other posts, hoping Stephen would get bored and turn his attentions to Fairchild, where they belonged.

But he continued to ring her up. Fairchild looked more and more wan, and nothing, not even the arrival of a new ambulance—which the Major had managed against all odds to talk HQ out of—stopped the FANYs from discussing “poor Fairchild.”

And on the first of September, the Major made it worse by issuing a new duty roster on which she and Fairchild were no longer partnered, leading to endless speculation over whether she or Fairchild had asked for the change.

Mary was almost grateful when the V-2 attacks began in September. It gave them all something else to think about, and it gave Stephen’s squadron a new challenge. His calls became less frequent and then ceased as the RAF wrestled with the problem of how to stop these new, much more deadly attacks.

Even Spitfires had no chance of catching up to the V-2s—they flew at nearly four thousand miles an hour, which was faster than the speed of sound, and took only four seconds to reach their target. As a result, there was no siren or warning rattle. The only sound they made was a sonic boom, and if one heard that, one had already survived the explosion.

The rockets struck out of nowhere, and it was amazing just how terrifying that was. Even the unflappable FANYs began staying indoors and stealing surreptitious glances at the sky when they were on a run. Sutcliffe-Hythe moved all her belongings down to the cellar, and Parrish told a GI who wanted to take her to a jitterbugging contest that she had to stay in and wash her hair.

On the way home from a run one morning, they saw a group of children with suitcases and with pasteboard tags around their necks being loaded onto buses. “What’s happening?” Mary asked.

“They’re being evacuated to the north,” Camberley explained, “out of range.”