Lydia turned to her husband. “Do you remember the letters you wrote me when you were in service?”

Niles squirmed.

“How would you like those letters posted for the world to see?”

His face flushed. Red blotches covered his neck.

Lydia patted her husband’s leg. “And if you say a word about this to anyone, I’ll make sure a copy of those lovely letters you sent me as a young chap end up in the hands of your golf club.”

CHAPTER 57 - EPPING, ENGLAND

CHAPTER 57

EPPING, ENGLAND

Susan stopped twice on the drive home to clear her watery eyes. Parked on the side of the road, she stared at the bones in the passenger seat. Inside the tin, a message from Ollie. Her head and heart reeled as the past collided with the present.

She arrived home with the intent to give Duchess a proper burial. But as she carried the remains and a garden trowel to the forest, she couldn’t bring herself to break the ground. The least she could do before placing her pigeon into the earth was to decipher the message. And finish what Duchess had given her life for. So she returned to the cottage and went to work.

For a month, Susan worked relentlessly on decoding the message. She spent her days and evenings scouring over the codes. Desperate to translate Ollie’s note, she took little time to eat and sleep. Exhausted, she began falling asleep at the kitchen table. And she resorted to setting an egg timer to force herself to take breaks. But either her mind was failing from age, she believed, or the words that Ollie had selected were quite different. After weeks of racking her brain over the codes, she had managed to decipher only one word, Susan, which was consistent with the other messages. She feared that she’d never be able to decipher Ollie’s words and that Duchess would remain in purgatory, sealed in a plastic sarcophagus at the bottom of her dresser.

As she deliberated over the message, a long dormant ache began to grow. Her broken heart, pieced together by time, had once again begun to crack. And accompanying the pang in her chest, a strange sense of indiscretion. Her thoughts were on Ollie, not Duncan.

She’d met Duncan five years after the war, shortly after completing her studies and accepting a position as a professor of ornithology at the university. Duncan, an engineering professor, had courted her, despite her overt lack of interest in him. But he was persistent, well-mannered, and, according to her colleagues, a good suitor. After a year of declining his offers to join him for dinner, she finally accepted. Ollie’s gone, she told herself as Duncan sat across from her, eating his roast chicken and peas.