The men of the town—husbands, sons, brothers—came in from hiding or from forced labor in Germany, and the drinking and celebration took a dark turn. As they took stock of the death and devastation caused by the Germans and collaborators, and dealt with the trauma and shame of occupation, riots broke out.

Didier seemed to have no grasp of reality. As the Germans fled like a pack of scalded dogs, he carefully folded away the uniform he’d worn as an officer in the Milice. “I shall miss this,” he said to Lisette, his voice slurred from an early morning bottle of wine. “It’s very well made, is it not? Perhaps I’ll take it to Cabret, the tailor, and have him remake it without the insignia.”

Gérard Cabret was a hero of the resistance who had recently opened a tailor shop in the village. He now had a wife and a baby son, Michel. “Surely you’re joking,” Lisette said to Didier. “Cabret wouldn’t touch that jacket with a barge pole.”

“You think you know everything. I should expose you as the whore you are. I fucked you for years with no results, and now you’re suddenly with child? Who is the father of that brat in your belly, eh?”

He is twice the man you will ever be, she wanted to say. “Your accusations will hurt you, not me,” she calmly replied. “Your reputation is already in tatters. What will people say if you accuse me of infidelity?”

“Then maybe I’ll beat it out of you,” he said, rolling up his sleeves.

She stood, not even blinking as she faced him down. “Lay a hand on me, and I’ll go straight to the village council,” she said.

The threat froze him in his tracks. She knew he lived in fear of reprisals from the people he’d betrayed during his time in the Milice.

Ultimately, she didn’t have to make good on her threat. One night without warning, Didier was taken while drinking his nightly bottle of wine, tied to a post, blindfolded, and shot. She watched this with a sense of dull shock and fully expected them to come for her next, but it turned out that her work for the resistance was well known. The returning maquisards honored her, and there was a marriage proposal from Jean-Luc d’Estérel, the boy she’d loved a lifetime ago.

She gave him a sad smile and a gentle no. There was no one for her but Hank. Even if she never saw him again, it would forever be Hank for her. Her one great love had come and gone.

She grieved with an intensity that cut like a knife. She kept her sanity by writing letters to Hank and sending them to Vermont in America, but they came back stamped undeliverable. The one thing that kept her moving through each moment was the baby. She talked to her unborn child about Hank as she erected a small iron cross at the remains of the hut, next to the stone he had carved for her. As her belly grew, she yearned to confess the truth about her baby’s father—that he was an American hero who fell from the sky.