Then he kissed her, lips brushing hers. “There are three words I want so much to say to you, Jess. But in my experience, every time someone over here says those words, something terrible happens to one of them not long after.” He drew back and studied her face.

It hurt just looking at him, hurt to see what he felt, which she recognized because she felt it too; she knew he was right and that if either of them said it, they’d be cursed by the words. They’d seen too many young lovers—nurses and soldiers, WACs and soldiers, Frenchwomen and soldiers—declare their love for one another and then wake up the next morning to find their love was as ill-fated as Romeo and Juliet’s, a tragedy playing out off the stage and on the battlefields of the European Theater.

She swallowed and blinked. “Then don’t say it.” She laid her palm along his cheek. “Instead I’m going to say…” She hesitated, searching for something, some alternative that could possibly express what had happened between them. “I know you,” she said at last. “Because I do. Better than anything or anyone.”

He kissed her again, long and searchingly, then whispered the same words—I know you—in her ear.

When he broke off she saw that his eyes shone as brightly as hers with the knowledge that they had both exposed their already fragile hearts to a brutality of the kind they had, despite every savage act they’d witnessed, never imagined.

He jumped out of bed, threw on his clothes and only said, “I can’t say goodbye,” before he left the room and she grabbed hold of his pillow and held it against her body, breathing in the faintest scent of him, barely able to catch her breath between sobs.

Twenty-two

Jess rolled into Munich in her jeep just after Dan’s division did. The city was synonymous with Hitler; it was well known to be his preferred headquarters, and the mood among the troops was buoyant. Surely if they were in Hitler’s city, the war would be over soon. Surely nobody else would die now.

The irony of dying so near the end was uppermost in everyone’s minds—all the more reason, Jess thought, to not say those words to Dan and to not let him say them to her.

As she followed Dan’s jeep to Prinzregentenplatz 16, Hitler’s apartment, anger surged through her. How dare Hitler run away to Berchtesgarten? How dare he not step into the street and see what he’d done? The women at the camp, the graves spread across Europe as thickly as blades of grass? How dare he be so craven? How could there be any justice, if justice was at all possible now?

She pulled up at the apartment and stepped inside with Dan. Her eyes saw but her mind barely registered the SS guards’ quarters on the first floor, the bomb shelters in the basement, the library, the small conference room in which everyone from Churchill to Franco to Mussolini had once sat. The plaster cast of Hitler’s hands, which Jennings bumped into and let smash onto the floor.