So he had given this trip his full support and blessing with his own hope that it provide his wife some kind of liberation from that time. Maybe then she’d open up about those years, the men she’d known that he suspected still hovered in her memory. One he knew about. Her brother, Lawrence, had confided that she’d been madly in love with a man she’d known since childhood, an RAF pilot shot down over France. “Somehow, sis tracked down his grave outside Paris and brought his body home for burial in Williamsburg, and after that, she let him go, Richard,” Lawrence had told him. “It was what Ralph would have wanted.” The other man was unknown, but Richard suspected that he was someone she had known in Paris who was dead, too, a casualty of that time.

It was the little things that made him think the effects of that man still lingered. “You do not fence anymore. Why?” he’d asked when he saw dozens of pictures of her in full fencing gear in a family photo album along with shots and newspaper clippings of her awards and wins in foil. She had removed the album from his hand. “It wasn’t fun anymore,” she’d said. Later, her father had told him that his daughter had not fenced since her return from “over there”—his name for France and her period in Paris.

When they were dating, she had a nasty fall and scraped a side of her cheek. He’d pulled out a handkerchief to dab at the blood, but she’d jerked her head aside, a strange look in her eye. “What’s wrong?” he said, alarmed that she’d mistaken his intent.

“Nothing,” she said. “I just…had a moment of déjà vu.”

There were murmurings in her sleep, unintelligible but uttered with a pathos of conscience that could come only from a well of deep remorse. What in the world had happened “over there”? After a while, the murmurings ceased, especially after the children came. One day he asked her, “Victoria, are you happy?”

“Of course I am, just as I promised.”

“To who?”

She’d kissed him. “To a friend I made in France,” she’d said.

And then there was the day a dragonfly had lighted on her hand. They were having a picnic with the girls by the lake in Central Park, and she had been fascinated by the swarm of dragonflies playing around near the surface of the water when suddenly one of the little fellows darted away from the group and made a beeline for Victoria’s hand. The girls had squealed, but his wife had stared at it with a look and smile he’d never forgotten. After a few moments, it flew away, and she said, “Richard, do you believe in…signs?”

“Do you?” he’d countered, knowing instinctively that the dragonfly had something to do with “over there.”