“I’m impressed,” Audrey said quietly.

“It just feels right. The country is at war. I think young people should go. Women as well as men.” She believed in equality for men and women, which wasn’t a popular point of view.

They talked about it some more that night, but Audrey could tell she’d made up her mind. It wasn’t entirely a patriotic decision. It was more of a practical one. She felt useless where she was and wanted to serve the men who would fall in battle in the coming months. She saw a need looming on the horizon, for nurses as well as soldiers, and she wanted to make her contribution to fill it. And she was wasting her abilities in her current job.

Audrey hugged her tight when Lizzie left to go back to Boston. She suddenly had the feeling that she didn’t know when they would see each other again.

“Let me know what you’re doing,” Audrey said, and Lizzie smiled at her for the first time in days.

“I’m not going to go sneaking off. I’ll come see you before they send me anywhere.”

She left a few minutes later.

Her parents were talking in the kitchen when she got home that night. She walked in and sat down with them with a serious expression.

“I have something to tell you,” she said quietly. She suddenly looked older and more grown up. Something about her had changed in the last month. She had already been different when she came back from Honolulu with Audrey, and her parents didn’t know what it was. “I’m going to enlist in the army, as a nurse.” She said it calmly and waited for their reaction. She knew there would be one and the storm hit quickly.

“Are you crazy? They’re not going to be drafting women,” her father told her.

“Maybe they should, Dad. I want to do my patriotic duty. They’re going to need nurses, lots of them, to treat the wounded.” She figured it was a better tack than saying that she hated her job and had nothing better to do, and that she didn’t mind risking her life, now that Will was dead. She didn’t care about her future without him now anyway. “I’m young. I’m a nurse. People like me are the ones who should go. I don’t have kids, I’m not married. They’ll need medical personnel. I just wanted to let you know that’s what I’m going to do.” Her mother was too amazed to even speak.

They both looked shocked as they stared at her and couldn’t seem to come up with a convincing argument to dissuade her. “When are you planning to do it?” her father asked in a hoarse voice. She was enlisting sooner than either of her brothers.