Eve quickened her steps, gazing at the houses she passed, wishing she had a home of her own for her and her son. What would that be like? Lights glowed from behind her neighbors’ windows, revealing glimpses of their lives, as if peering at distant television screens. She knew very little about her neighbors, including Mrs. Herder, even though she passed the older woman and her dog nearly every day. Eve only assumed her name was Herder because it was printed on her mailbox out front. The older woman lived in an historic house with a wide front porch that stood at the very edge of Eve’s neighborhood of new, postwar bungalows. Mrs. Herder still displayed a gold star in her window six years after the war had ended, as if she didn’t want anyone to forget that she had lost a loved one. The star stirred memories of Alfie Clarkson, Eve’s first love, who had also died in the war. Alfie and Mum and Granny —Eve wished she could hang gold stars somewhere to tell the world how much she missed them.

She turned to watch Mrs. Herder and her dog walk up the steps and enter their house and felt a wave of homesickness for the little English village of Wellingford, where she’d grown up. Her neighbors had known each other’s names and had watched out for each other, their brick and stone cottages sitting shoulder to shoulder as if closing ranks against the outside world, not separated by private lawns and picket fences as they were here in America. The cottage in the village that she’d shared with Granny, and the nearby woods where she’d loved to roam, were the only true homes Eve could recall. But she had needed a new start for herself and Harry after the war, in a place where no one knew the shame of Harry’s birth. While she wasn’t proud of the way she had maneuvered that fresh start, things had turned out better than she deserved, for both her and her son. They lived with Eve’s widowed friend, Audrey Barrett, paying rent every month, and the four of them had become a family of sorts. But if Eve could wish for any gift this Christmas, it would be a home of her own.

Harry wasn’t in his usual place, watching for Eve from the front window as she walked up the driveway to Audrey’s little bungalow. She went inside through the kitchen door, stomping snow off her boots. She pulled off her hat, then smoothed down her hair. “It’s snowing again,” she told Audrey.

“The boys will be happy about that.” Audrey stood at the kitchen stove, mashing a pot of potatoes into gooey submission. “Personally, I don’t much like driving in snow.”

“We drove our ambulances on some rather slippery roads during the war, remember?”