“I’m so glad you came, and didn’t just send the journal by post,” he said, and looked as though he meant it. “I’m glad I met the famous firebrand.” She almost seemed like a gift from Pru. They both laughed at what he said, and he hugged her before she left. There was a train waiting in the station. She bought a ticket and got on it. He waved as it pulled away, and she leaned out the window and shouted back to him.

“Merry Christmas!”

“And to you, Emma!” he shouted back. They were both smiling as the train left the station. It had been a perfect Christmas, Emma thought, thanks to Pru.

Alex had a letter from Dan Stanley, which arrived on Christmas Eve. She hadn’t heard from him since he went back to the front, and he couldn’t tell her where he was. He sounded friendly and in good spirits in the letter, and said he had been thinking of her. Alex thought she might not hear from him again, since she hadn’t in so long. She was happy when she did. It had been five months. So much had happened since he left. Pru and Audrey had died. The war was raging on, although Paris had been liberated.

The Germans seemed to have an unlimited supply of bombs to drop on Great Britain. And it was hard to believe that Europe was celebrating its sixth wartime Christmas. The war had become a way of life by then. But Dan sounded cheerful in his letter, and suggested to her that when the war finally ended, she come to Paris and celebrate with him, which seemed like a bold thing to say. She wouldn’t have admitted it to him, but she liked the idea. She was sure her parents would have been horrified at the thought of her meeting a man in Paris, but she was an adult, and she was in the air forces. She was sure they would be even more horrified if they met him. But he was a good man, and she felt comfortable with him, more than she ever had with her parents’ friends, or the men they considered suitable. There was nothing about her life in the air forces that they would approve of, and she knew that when the war was over and she went back to New York, that would have to change. Maybe Dan Stanley would be part of that change. She was surprised to realize that she liked that idea very much.