A new, distant thunder was approaching, and Sophie crouched over Piotr, as if she could protect him from whatever new threat was coming. Out of the corner of her eye, hooves flashed as the mare galloped wildly past, the copper-colored foal nowhere to be seen.

Sophie straightened and pressed a soft kiss to her husband’s lips.

And fourteen hours after she had become a wife, Sophie became a widow.

Chapter 3

Chapter
3

Estelle

Near Metz, France
17 June 1940

Twenty-two widows.

Twenty-two was the number of men wearing wedding bands who died before Estelle Allard could get them to the field hospital in her ambulance. And it was barely past noon.

She wasn’t entirely sure when she had started noticing that detail or why it seemed to matter so much to her. Each one of the men she transported from the front lines was a loved one to somebody, married or not. Perhaps it was because she had always wondered what it might be like to love and be loved with the entirety that a marriage suggested. To have someone simply accept your flaws and love you despite them. Or maybe for them. To love so deeply and so completely that you couldn’t imagine a future without that person.

The thought of a love like that was as terrifying as it was enviable because it could be lost in a second. As it had been for the twenty-two women who were waiting for a love who would never come home again.

Estelle’s ambulance bounced over the deep ruts across the field, and she shifted down to bring the battered vehicle to a shuddering halt, eyeing the rows of men waiting on stretchers. Rows of writhing, screaming, and bleeding men and still more who were simply lying in ominous silence. So many. Too many.

“What the hell took you so long, Allard?” a haggard medic barked at her as she shoved her door open and slid down from the hard bench.

She swayed slightly as her feet hit the ground. “And it’s good to see you’re still alive too, Jerome.”

“You were gone too long.” Jerome de Colbert ignored her greeting, kneeling beside one of the prone figures on the ground. “You need to be faster.”

“There’s no fuel,” she replied dully. It was always the fuel that slowed her down. That slowed all the drivers down. The little that was in the ambulance’s tank had come from a newly abandoned farmyard a mile south, the inhabitants terrified enough to have left everything behind in the face of the invading Germans.

“Rachel driving behind you somewhere?” he asked, standing.