“Och, you’re just as bad as he is!” I exclaimed. “He had to fly to Norway. That’s what they do. It’s their war work. Sometimes they don’t make it back.”

I tossed off the covers and scrambled to my knees in the inky black. “All right, I can prove to both you gumpuses it was an op just like any other.”

Louisa:

Ellen threw open the door at the end of the bed. The room beyond held a faint memory of light, red in the hearth, paler black around the curtained windows. Ellen climbed out of the box bed, felt her way to the door where her satchel hung on a peg, and brought the bag back.

Back inside the closed box bed, she lit an electric torch. She gave me a square blue notebook, like a clothbound exercise jotter. She held her torch so I could look at the cover.

Printed on the blue cloth in black ink it said Royal Air Force: Pilot’s Flying Log Book.

Beneath that was a space for the owner’s name. In looping script like a schoolboy’s was written James G. Beaufort-Stuart.

“He asked me to fetch it,” Ellen said.

I let the notebook fall open. It was a list of all the flights Jamie ever made with the Royal Air Force, right back to his first training flight, not much more than a year ago. I turned pages carefully. His early operational entries, last summer as the Battle of Britain began, were like the casualty lists. He was supposed to log how long each flight took and where he’d gone, but he also noted every time anyone in 648 Squadron was shot down. Then there wasn’t room for that. So sometime in September he limited it to just his mates in Pimms Section.

Then there was the entry for 7 November 1940.

That night, men had died in A-Flight as well as B-Flight. Jamie had listed the names of six men in Pimms and added a note that said, Also five lost in Madeira and thirteen in A-Flight. His pen nib had torn the page where he’d drawn a line under also for emphasis.

Twenty-four men died that night—two-thirds of 648 Squadron, more even than last week.

They’d died on a routine mission.

And I knew then that Ellen was right. The Valentine’s mission had also been routine. The deaths that night didn’t have anything to do with me.

But I also knew that I’d feel like they were my responsibility forever, all of us would feel responsible forever, even if there wasn’t anything Jamie or I or Ellen or Felix Baer or anyone could have ever done to prevent those deaths.

I closed the book with a sob.

Ellen dropped the torch. She rocked me like a baby, dropping little kisses on my head and crooning in a language I didn’t understand. She was crying too.

Jamie: