Emma had helped her put on her uniform after she heard the news. She had dressed her as she would a child. Pru saw that there were still dim lights behind the blackout shades at her home, when she got there after two in the morning. The faint trace of light was coming from her parents’ room. When she opened the front door, which was never locked in the big rambling manor house, she could hear them talking in the back parlor. There was a fire dying in the grate. The house was always drafty, even in the summer. Her mother turned to look at her in the dying light of the embers. Max was sitting with her, and their father was dozing in a chair by the fire, his chin on his chest. Even in the half darkness, they suddenly looked so much older to her. Everyone did now, a whole nation of people who had aged from hunger, heartache, and grief for five years of war. Max stood up, walked toward her, and put his arms around her. He looked just like their father when he was younger, which was comforting in an odd way. There was a sense of continuity to it.

“I was hoping you’d come,” she said softly, her words muffled by his jacket as he held her. “How are they?” she whispered about their parents, but she could see for herself when she went to kiss their mother. She held tightly to Pru’s hand as Pru sat down next to her, and her eyes looked ravaged. But she was as they always were: strong, quiet, determined to prevail no matter what it cost them, brave in the face of sorrow. They were the people she could count on, whatever happened, just as they could count on her. She hugged her mother close, and they both cried for a moment, and then her mother sat up straighter and Max watched them both. They were the two women he most admired. He always thought of them as brave and strong, and now was no different.

“I’ve spoken to Reverend Alsop. We’ll hold a service for Phillip in two days, before you and Max have to leave,” she said quietly. Pru wondered how many more of these services they could endure going to. There were so many. So many boys from the farms had been killed, and from the great houses. All the boys she had grown up with and found so boring before the war. They weren’t boring now. Most of them were gone, had been killed in the last five years in battles with names she would always remember, in Europe, North Africa, in places she had never been to.

Her mother gently woke her father, and they all stood up and walked upstairs together.