Irene couldn’t think. She didn’t remember that she herself had told Sam, if their baby was a boy, to name their son after her father. Between the physical pain and the morphine for the pain, there was not enough room for memory or even grief. She only felt grief when she was asleep.

But she wanted to feel grief. She wanted to mourn. So she just said, Yes, that’s perfect, and let herself go.

After that, Irene did not want to live. She could survive the loss of a baby, because women did that all the time, and she could survive pain because she had experienced physical agony so often before. But she could not survive both at once, and when their water began to run out the next day, there was just no point in living, was there? Nobody was going to rescue them. She begged Sam to take his service pistol and shoot her. If she were dead, he could keep the rest of the water for himself; he could go for help, he could save himself.

Sam said that if she were dead, he would have no reason to save himself. He went on changing her bandages. He moved her inside the airplane, to shelter her from the sun, and sat with her, and brushed her hair, and wrote in his diary. He said he wanted some record of events to survive when the wreckage was found. In case his Pixie ever grew up and wondered what had happened to her father.

In the meantime, in the outside world, people were still obsessed with the mystery of Irene Foster’s disappearance, although not so much as three weeks ago because hope of discovering her alive had begun to fade. The Sahara was a harsh, miserable, inhospitable climate, after all. You could not survive long. So airplanes continued to crisscross North Africa, but not so many as before, and interestingly George Morrow was not among them. George Morrow was in Spain.

He had flown from Casablanca a week ago, and while there’s no record of exactly where he first landed—so much Republican paperwork was destroyed in the course of war—it’s certain he arrived at the government-held airfield in Valencia on the fifteenth of May. Probably he had heard some rumor, or received an anonymous note, because the Foster disappearance had captured attention everywhere, even in the midst of war, and many in Spain did not approve of wives leaving their husbands for lovers. So Morrow came to Valencia and asked to speak to the commandant, and the commandant—after some persuasion, no doubt—admitted that they had recently received word that Miss Foster and Mr. Mallory had gone missing while flying between Bilbao and Valencia, and that one of his best pilots was out right now, scouring the desert in order to find them.