I took their last name, but kept my original family surname as my middle name. In school the next year, I couldn’t have been more proud when I signed my first paper: William Kensington Moore.

Peyton stood and moved to the corkboard, scanning it again. Her eyes locked on a worn picture pinned near the floor. She pulled it from the board and studied it. Three children stood there: on the left was a girl, perhaps three years old; in the middle stood a girl of perhaps seven; and on the right was a boy of eleven, with only one arm.

“I know who wrote this,” she said.

Desmond moved to her side and gazed at the picture. “You do?”

She pointed at the youngest girl in the picture. “That’s me. Madison’s in the middle; Andrew on the right. William Kensington Moore is my father.”

Chapter 79

Chapter 79

Desmond tried to process Peyton’s words.

“I thought you said your father was dead?”

“I thought he was,” she replied. “Maybe he is. We don’t know when this letter was written.”

She returned to the couch, sat down beside Desmond, and pulled the thick quilt back over her. Outside the stone cottage, the sunrise broke through the fog. She wondered how long Avery would be asleep, how long they had before they’d need to make a decision. And what they’d find in the rest of the pages.

What I remember about the first years after the war was that Britain was broke. We’d won the Second World War, but it had come at a fantastic cost—most of all in lives, but also in pounds and pence. America suddenly and unexpectedly ended the Lend-Lease program that had likely saved us. The Treasury was near bankruptcy. So began the Age of Austerity; it seemed we’d survived the Nazis only to starve to death. And we weren’t the only ones. The entire world was freezing, starving, and still reeling from the greatest conflict in human history. In Britain, rationing and conscription continued. The winter of 1946-47 was one of the worst in recorded history. Coal and railway systems failed, factories closed, and people were very, very cold.

Things turned a little each year. The Americans loaned us 3.75 billion dollars at a low interest rate in July of 1946. The Marshall Plan launched in 1948, further bolstering our financial situation.

Everyone felt that the next war was right around the corner. I did too. It was hard not to. But the world was doing everything it could to stop it—and to get ready. The United Nations was formed in 1945, NATO in ’49. Britain began giving its colonies independence: Jordan in ’46, India and Pakistan in ’47, Israel, Myanmar, and Sri Lanka in ’48. Even more nations gained independence from the UK during the fifties and sixties: Sudan, Ghana, Malaysia, Nigeria, Kuwait, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Jamaica, Uganda, and Kenya.