“I should be asking you that,” he said.

She smiled wryly. “I’m still standing.”

“Like St. Paul’s.”

Exactly like St. Paul’s—battered, damaged, and looking out on a landscape of devastation.

“I had something else to say last night,” he said. “We don’t know for certain that the war was lost. There’s a possibility that the continuum may succeed in undoing the damage we’ve incurred.”

“Though it will have to kill us to do it,” she said.

But it was still better than the alternative. And her dying to stop Hitler from winning the war was no different from what tens of thousands of British soldiers and civilians had done, and they’d had no guarantee that they’d be successful either.

But at least they hadn’t had to worry about endangering everyone else in the foxhole or the shelter by their mere presence. “What about the others?” she asked him. “The contemps we’ve interacted with?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Those factors that protected the continuum for so long—the ability to absorb and diminish and cancel out effects—may be factors in the correction as well.”

Translation: It might only have to kill a few of them.

“If we separate ourselves from them and don’t have any more contact, is there a chance that will keep them from being killed?” she asked him.

“I don’t know. Perhaps.” But there was not much hope in his voice. “It’s impossible to know how far the damage has spread and if alterations have already occurred that must be counteracted.”

Were Alf and Binnie supposed to have gone on the City of Benares and drowned? Or died along with their mother near Piccadilly Circus? And was Marjorie supposed to have died in the rubble and Private Hardy at Dunkirk and Stephen Lang on the way to London from Hendon Airfield? Or would Mrs. Hodbin have torn up the letter, Private Hardy have been picked up by another boat, the others have survived and gone on to do exactly what they did do? There was no possible way to tell.

But if we haven’t altered their lives already, Polly thought, then perhaps our staying away from them from now on can protect them from being caught within our deadly blast radius. Thank goodness we’re not at Mrs. Rickett’s anymore and not staying at Notting Hill Gate. And now that she was at ENSA, she had a perfect excuse for quitting Sir Godfrey’s troupe. She went and got the ration coupons and then the eggs and a quarter pound of beef, but no soup bone. The butcher hadn’t any. She had to settle for bouillon cubes.

She took them home, made Mr. Dunworthy a soft-boiled egg, and then set out again to fetch his things from a dreary, chill room in the only part of Carter Lane which hadn’t burned on the twenty-ninth. She’d intended to go tell Mr. Humphreys that she’d got Mr. Hobbe safely home, but now she didn’t dare risk it. He had been nothing but kind to her. He didn’t deserve …