Lizzie spent the week in Annapolis with Audrey and Ellen. She needed to be with them. They all sat in Will’s boyhood room and cried, looking at pictures of him. It was inconceivable to them that he wasn’t coming back, and even more so to his mother. Lizzie could still feel his lips, and his arms around her. It was all so fresh in her mind, and now, three weeks later, he was dead. It had all been so brief and so powerful. She couldn’t imagine life without him, or a future she would care about. What she did now no longer mattered to her. Her father called and reminded her that she had to go back to work at the hospital, but she didn’t care if they fired her. She hated her job anyway. He used his influence to get her a leave of absence. He said he felt very sad for the Parkers, but he told Lizzie she had to be back in Boston by the end of the week to pick up the threads of her own life again. He had no idea how deeply she had loved Will, or what promises they had made each other.

They still had no news of when his body would be returned when she finally left Annapolis on Sunday, a week after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Everyone was talking about war having been declared, and what it meant. Boys were going to be drafted, since the draft had been instated a year before. Thousands had already enlisted that week as a patriotic gesture, and she suspected that her own brothers would join the army now too. Her older brother, Greg, could go as a doctor in the medical corps, but Henry had only just started medical school, and she had no idea what they would do with him, or where he would be sent. America would join the war in Europe now too. Some men would be sent to the Pacific, and others to Europe. The country was in chaos, waiting to hear what would happen next. Those who had enlisted would be sent to basic training soon.

The atmosphere at the hospital was somber when Lizzie went back to work. Some doctors were talking about enlisting. Others were going to wait to be drafted. Some of the nurses were talking about enlisting too, which surprised Lizzie. She hadn’t thought about the nurses that would be needed too, not just physicians.

She went through the motions at work and barely spoke to her parents at night. She felt as though a part of her had died with Will on the airfield at Pearl Harbor.