“Just think of all the photographs you can send back to your magazine. We’ll have a gala opening. It should be open by Christmas, don’t you think, Miss Drewes?”

“If not sooner,” said Miss Drewes.

Wallis was smiling, tapping her sharp finger on her knee, waving the Chinese fan. She gazed out the window at the passing landscape. We were climbing the hill now, back toward Government House, and the shacks of Grants Town had begun to thin out and make way for the villas and bungalows of white Nassau, soaked in sunshine. As if struck by inspiration, Wallis turned back to me.

“Of course we’ll set up a canteen for the colored troops too,” she said. “Where they can listen to their own music and eat their own food. Won’t that be fun?”

By the time I arrived home, Veryl had gone for the day, bound for the afternoon shift at the Prince George. The bungalow was shut tight as an oyster. I went around switching on the electric fans, opening the windows, but no amount of manufactured draft, no amount of fresh air—such as it was—could chase away the noontime heat of Nassau at the end of June. And the smell, the potpourri of rotting flowers and mildew. That odor, it hangs in my nostrils still.

She’d laid the morning post on the table, as was our custom since September, when the invitations began to arrive through the letter slot in their dozens, dinner parties and tennis parties and Red Cross fairs, even an occasional wedding or two. Sometimes I wonder how those couples turned out, where those lives exist now, on what continent and with how many children, or at all. On this particular night, I was due to attend both a supper dance for the RAF officers at the Emerald Beach Hotel and a dinner party at Lady Annabelle Taylor’s place. The dance sounded like better fun; the dinner, like better gossip. I set my hat on the stand and straightened my hair. In the mirror, I caught the reflection of the table behind me, and the stack of cards and invitations, and beneath these small, ecru envelopes a larger one, a parcel, plain brown and wrapped in string, the parcel I dreaded.

I allowed myself the luxury of a moment’s hesitation. Sometimes you have to gather yourself, you know, sometimes you need to gird your loins or whatever needs girding. In that empty instant, I recalled a dream I had the night before, just a flash of it, in which I was wandering down a hotel corridor in search of something, I didn’t know what, something peculiar. The way it is in dreams.