She walked up the stairs slowly and was surrounded by her friends when she got to her room. The officer had told her that she had been cleared for a three-day leave to go home to Yorkshire, to see her parents. They had heard the news by then. She didn’t have the heart to call them. All she wanted was to go home. Her mind was a blank and Emma and the others helped her pack. Trains were scarce and were running off schedule, and all nonessential travel was discouraged. But she knew that if she waited long enough, she could catch a train north that night. She had priority as an officer. And all she had to do was hope that the train or the tracks didn’t get bombed while she was aboard.

She left the barracks in a blur an hour later, after all the girls hugged her. Someone with a car drove her to the train station—she couldn’t even remember who afterwards. All she knew was that her baby brother was dead. He had been flying daring missions for almost exactly five years, as her older brother, Max, had too. She had been told that they would not be able to recover his body. The plane had exploded in midair after the first volley of shots. She hoped it had been quick, and she was sure he would have been mad as hell when they went down. She hadn’t called her parents because she had no idea what to say. She saw men die every day, but she didn’t have to face their mothers and fathers or any of the people who had loved them.

She caught a freight train out at eight o’clock that night, and sat staring blindly out the window, remembering what a terror he had been as a little boy, how he had taunted her into climbing the tallest trees, and blamed her for everything he’d done. She had hated him for a while. Her older brother, Max, was always the sensible one. Then she had come to love Phillip more than ever before as they grew up. And now he was gone.

The train left her at the station in York at one in the morning. She hadn’t told anyone she was coming, and with her suitcase in hand, she walked the five miles from the station in the silent darkness, grateful to be alone to gather her thoughts. She would have to face her parents in the morning. She wondered if Max had gotten leave to come home too. She hoped so. They hadn’t seen him in months, and she needed his solid comfort now. He would be devastated too.