She’d whirled around from the cutting table with a cry of disbelief and all she could say was, “Do you still carry my yearbook picture in your wallet?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “It’s right here.” And he’d pulled out the photo, limp and faded, to show her. “Your letter to me, too, written from Stephens College.”

She’d asked him how he knew where to find her.

“Your pal Gladys told me when I was in Traverse City on furlough this week. She happened to be home, too. Imagine clingy, insecure, stay-at-home Mommy and Daddy’s little girl, Gladys Bradbury, an American Airlines stewardess traveling the world.”

“Yes, imagine that,” Bridgette said. “And you flew all the way to California to…see me?”

“Who else? I had to make sure that you were okay.” His gaze probed her face. “Are you okay?”

“I am now,” she’d said.

She still possessed the letter Steve had written to her at Stephens College informing her of his coming deployment overseas with the Forty-fifth Infantry Division. His unit had been first on the scene to liberate Dachau concentration camp in April, so when she’d gone against orders and told him about her incarceration in Drancy prison to explain the cause of her nightmares and disinclination for sex, he had understood.

In the end, love was not enough. He had his needs and she had hers. Their worlds collided. Steve loved California, and after his discharge from the army he applied to and was accepted into the LAPD academy. A year into the marriage, Bridgette was offered a job in New York City working for the widely acclaimed fashion designer Norman Norell, the first in his ranks to see the need for a line of clothes created for the petite woman.

They were divorced after eighteen months, parting in sorrow and tearful embraces on the courthouse steps but united in a friendship that had withstood the erosion of time and distance, other loves and losses, and the incompatibility of their interests, tastes, and pursuits.