He twisted at his cap again. “You hadn’t finished Middlemarch. A couple of us queued at Farringdon Station anticipating an air raid. When it didn’t happen, well... We were wondering what’s next in the story.”

“We?” She followed his side gaze to the large plate-glass windows of Primrose Hill Books and found a crowd gathered outside the store. Mrs. Kittering was there, as well as many others Grace recognized, and waved with a hopeful smile.

Grace turned her attention back to Jack, who gave her a hesitant grin. “Would you be so kind as to read to us still, even though we aren’t in the tube?”

She glanced to Mr. Evans who looked at her with a paternal pride that crinkled the corners of his blue eyes as he offered her a nod of silent consent to their request.

Biting her lip, Grace considered the size of the store. Last year, such a request would have been impossible. But now...

“Yes,” she replied. “I absolutely can.”

And so it was she settled on the second step of the circular metal stairs while everyone else sat about on the floor or propped themselves against the wall to listen to her read from Middlemarch.

Mr. Evans’s white hair was visible along the top of a bookshelf one row over and remained there for the duration of her reading, as though he too was listening.

After that, she read every day, either in the tube, or at Primrose Hill Books when there was no air raid. But while the days were filled with stories and the many people who came to listen to her, the nights were filled with bombs.

It was, in a single encompassing word, wretched.

The evenings when Grace didn’t work alongside Mr. Stokes, she was getting only a few moments of miserable sleep in the cramped Anderson shelter buried in the backyard.

One such evening, she and Mrs. Weatherford had prepared to go into the Andy with their bedding and a small box containing necessities: a candle, their gas masks, though Germany no longer seemed interested in poison, Grace’s latest book, The Waves by Virginia Woolf, and a vacuum flask of tea.

Rain was pouring down when the air raid siren went off, sending the women racing out into the deluge and through the muddy garden. The Andy rose in the dark like a sleeping beast, its hump wild with bristles of hair where sprigs of tomato plants sprouted from the dirt layering it. But when Grace stepped into the shelter, her foot sank up to the ankle in a pool of icy water.

She cried out in surprise and leapt back out.

“Is it mice?” Mrs. Weatherford asked, jerking away in horror.