“She was the only person of her kind who never cared that I grew up in the East End. She didn’t have a snobbish bone in her body,” Emma said, crying. “All she had was that huge heart of hers.” The matron on their floor asked Emma to pack Pru’s things to send home to her family. Emma was wracked by sobs when she did, and in the bottom drawer of the dresser Pru had used, she found a dog-eared red leather journal that she had seen Pru write in occasionally, though not very often. She never had time. Emma put it aside and decided to read it. She would send it to Pru’s family after she did. They wouldn’t miss it. They didn’t know it existed. And when she sat down with it that night, a handful of photographs fell out, all of Emma and their other friends at various times, from fun moments they had shared, birthday parties and dinners out, plus a photograph of Ed and one of Reggie in the cockpit. He was gone now too. She thought the journal might mean more to Max, since it was mostly about her time in the air force, and some of it might make him laugh. Emma felt sorry for him too, but had never met him or Pru’s parents, so she felt awkward just sending it to him.

Ed was as devastated as Emma, even more so because he was guilt-ridden for having taken the day off. The same thing had happened when their crew’s plane lost an engine and Pru and Emma were MIA for eight days. But this time the entire crew had died, and he hadn’t, and he couldn’t forgive himself. He sobbed in Lizzie’s arms when he found out, and he got blind drunk that night. Why hadn’t he died with her? Why had he been spared? The questions kept going around in his mind, and Emma was the first to absolve him.

“We don’t decide these things,” Emma said, trying to get through to him in the abyss of guilt where he was drowning. “They happen. We’re in the wrong place, or the right one, on any given day. God decides. We don’t.”

“She was twenty-five years old. She didn’t deserve to die. She was the best person I knew, always kind to everyone, always generous, always forgiving. Why Pru?” he sobbed.

“It was her destiny. It could be you or me tomorrow. None of us knows.” Her brother, Phillip, had been twenty-four.

“It should have been me instead of her,” he said angrily.