“Excuse me,” Dan said, turning away too abruptly to be polite but needing to leave before he snapped. Who really knew which reporters the Pulitzer board was considering in any of the categories? Which is why it was ridiculous of him to imagine that Jess would come.

He stepped outside onto 52nd Street and breathed in deeply. He should eat something. He should definitely not have anything more to drink. The thought evaporated as a scent reached his nose. His head spun from side to side and then, there she was, more breathtaking than ever in a long, full-skirted gown that reminded him of the dress she’d worn the night they’d danced at the chateau. But it was blue, the color of skies and oceans and impossible dreams, not the khaki color of war and death and their love.

He couldn’t speak. He didn’t need to; everything he felt and thought was written plainly on his face.

Jess slipped in beside him. “I don’t need to ask how you are,” she said softly.

She’d obviously noticed that he was halfway to drunk and nervous as hell. He turned his body toward her so that he could see her face and discovered it was guarded in a way he’d never seen it before. What had happened over the past year?

“I’ve never seen you in anything other than a uniform,” she said, a small smile touching her mouth. “The tuxedo suits you.”

The reference to their past gave him hope. “I’ve been driving myself crazy with wondering if you’d come,” he said. “I’m not staying married to Amelia. She’s agreed to a divorce, after tonight. I don’t know what kind of man that makes me—someone who’d put his life on the line for any man in his battalion but someone who can’t stomach staying with a woman he’s injured—so perhaps you don’t want me anymore. But I love you, Jess. Those last days of the war messed with my head and made me think I had to save my men and that the only way to do that was to marry her. But I can only save myself. I want to be with you.”

As he spoke, her eyes filled with tears which then trailed over her cheeks in delicate streams that he wanted to kiss away, to let her know that, from now on, there’d be nothing to cry about. He saw her guard crack and then fall, exposing what he knew to be true: that she hadn’t stopped loving him either. That the past year had been hell for her too.

He reached for her hand but she wouldn’t let him have it. Instead she drew it up to her chest, her other hand clutching it, as if all she had to hold on to was herself.

“I went to see Victorine this afternoon,” she said, her voice low. “I gather you haven’t been home or you’d have heard. She’s a wonderful child. I miss her so.” He heard her voice break on the last words and he again reached out for her, needing to draw her in to take away every hurt he’d inflicted on her but she refused to come any closer.