“You first,” Ernest said, and leaned back, sipping his coffee—which even the brandy couldn’t improve—as they told him about their adventures. They’d spirited Jewish refugees and pilots who’d been shot down across the Channel to England and delivered supplies and coded messages to the French Resistance.

And he knew he should be worried that what they’d done—what he’d done when he unfouled that propeller and kept them from getting hit by that Stuka—had altered events. He’d been afraid of that ever since Private Hardy. But oddly, he wasn’t worried.

He’d thought he’d got the Commander and Jonathan killed, and he hadn’t. Which meant maybe other things he’d feared weren’t true either. Maybe it wasn’t true that he’d been unable to find Denys Atherton and get Polly and Eileen out before Polly’s deadline. Maybe it wasn’t true that something he’d done that night in Dunkirk—saving Hardy’s life or hauling that dog up over the side—had lost the war. If the Commander and Jonathan were alive, then anything was possible.

Or maybe it was just his relief at not being a murderer. Or the brandy.

“These last four months we’ve been helping map the beaches in Normandy,” the Commander said casually.

Mapping the beaches. Jesus, an incredibly dangerous job. And, if they were caught, one that could undo everything Fortitude South had worked so hard to accomplish the last few months.

“Your turn,” the Commander was saying. “What have you been doing? How long were you in hospital?”

“Nearly four months,” he said. “I tried to get in touch with you. That’s why I thought you were dead. After I wrote you, Daphne—”

“Our Daphne, from the Crown and Anchor?”

“Yes. She came to tell me you hadn’t made it back from Dunkirk. Have you sent them word you’re alive?”

Jonathan shook his head.

“Not even your mother?”

“No. After we brought Colonel Tensing back, they sent us straight out again to lay mines against the invasion, and by the time we got back, they already thought we were dead.”

“Which we might have been at any time,” the Commander said. “And then when we started doing missions for Intelligence, everything had to be hush-hush. And we were as good as dead anyway, with the sort of thing they wanted us to do. It was only a matter of our having been killed a bit later than they thought. And if Jonathan’s mother had known he was alive, she’d never have let him do it.”

Jonathan nodded. “So it seemed better all around to let them go on believing we were dead. I suppose that seems hard to you.”

“No,” Ernest said, thinking of what he’d done to Polly and Eileen. “I know sometimes things like that are necessary.”

The Commander nodded. “If it means the difference between winning or losing this war”—

Or getting Polly and Eileen out or not.

—“then it was worth the sacrifice, wasn’t it?”

Yes, Ernest thought, it was worth the sacrifice. And speaking of which …