He closed the meeting, picked up his hat, locked his office door and left, driving upstate to nowhere, he’d thought, until he turned into a driveway at the house where Jennings’ parents lived.

“Just the man I wanted to thank,” Mrs. Jennings said as she embraced him and poured tea for him and cut him an enormous slice of cake. “I think you had the hardest job in the war, keeping my son alive. I expected he’d be returned to me with at least a few scratches but he looks the same as always.”

Dan smiled. “He didn’t tell you about the broken bones?”

“I can’t see those. They must have healed up just fine.” Mrs. Jennings sipped her tea. “I still can’t believe the two of you used to hide frogs in the maids’ beds but for three years gone you were fighting a war. And doing an excellent job of it too, I hear.”

“I did what everyone else did. No more. No less.” The reply rolled off Dan’s tongue the way it always did, succinct and a little clipped, signifying that they should talk about something else. Because how could anyone do an excellent job of leading men to their deaths or, if not death, serious injury? How could anyone look at Amelia and say he’d done an excellent job?

“What’s he doing now?” Dan asked. “The end was such a rush that I didn’t get a chance to find out whether he was coming up here to stay with you or going back to the city.”

Mrs. Jennings pushed her plate away. “I’d appreciate you speaking to him for me. He always listens to you. He’s a little…lost.”

“That can’t be right.” The vehemence in Dan’s voice surprised them both. He paused and ate a mouthful of cake before he continued. “I just meant that he was a stronger man at the end than he was at the beginning. I thought he’d land on his feet.”

“He is a stronger man.” It was Mrs. Jennings’ turn to pause. “But what does one do with the sort of strength one learns when fighting a war?”

Mrs. Jennings’ words played over in Dan’s head as he drove back to the city, Jennings’ address written on a piece of folded paper in his pocket. What had Dan done with everything he’d learned? Nothing. He’d become, in fact, a coward. Sitting behind a desk at the newspaper offices, restlessly shuffling his feet through meetings, avoiding his wife, pretending to Victorine that everything would work out fine.

At a nondescript block of apartments in Midtown, Dan rang the buzzer until a slurred voice answered.

“Jennings?” Dan asked uncertainly.

The door clicked open.

The man who greeted Dan held the shadows of Jennings in his face, overlaid by someone puffier, unshaven and slightly rank, still smelling of the night before. “What are you doing to yourself?” Dan demanded as he snapped on the lights so he could see more clearly.

Jennings flinched and reached up to turn the lights off. “Same thing as you,” he said to Dan. “Forgetting. Except I’m not doing it with a wife and a child and a job as the editor of a newspaper. I’m doing it with this.” Jennings gestured to two empty bottles on the floor.