“Come here,” he said, lifting his arms and she walked into them, helmet pressed awkwardly into his shoulder, crying now, but only for a few minutes because if he could stomach everything he’d seen, which would be so much worse than what she’d witnessed, then so too could she.

“Sorry,” she said, drawing back. “And thanks. I haven’t had a shower for five days. It’s an act of bravery in itself coming close to me right now. I think you just repaid the favor you owed me.”

“Jess, holding you while you cry isn’t repaying a favor. It’s being a friend.” His voice was soft, a lovely caress amidst the savagery.

She shook her head. “God, don’t say that. I’ll start crying again.” She smiled. “It’s good to see you alive.”

“It’s good to see you too.”

“Do you have to get back?”

He checked his watch. “Not for an hour.”

“Then come with me.”

She led him to a small ridge, a place she’d sat a few times over the past couple of days, watching the activity on the beach. They sat there now, backs against the rock, flattened blackberry brambles twisting forlornly around them, and she told him about Martha’s escapade and the parachute jumps they’d been denied due to having delicate female apparatus and what she’d said to Warren in reply.

He laughed and she saw his face relax for a moment, the lines furrowed on his forehead suddenly fall away, but return just a moment later.

“Oh no,” she said with a sudden flash of horror. “Not Jennings?” She gestured to the graves behind them.

“Not Jennings. But a hell of a lot of others just like him. Some didn’t even make the ground alive. Their time in the U.S. Army consisted of a training camp in England, a plane ride across the Channel, then death in the air.” He rubbed his face but it didn’t erase the troubled expression. “I was ordered to take this afternoon off to sleep; I haven’t slept properly for a week. But now that we’ve secured the causeway and the beachheads have been joined up, I had to come here.”

Jess jumped up. “I’m keeping you from sleep. You should go.”

But he stayed where he was and patted the ground beside him. “No, this is what I need. To laugh. To talk…” He stopped.

“Tell me about it,” she said, sitting back down.

“Have you ever seen an airborne division in the sky?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“It’s kind of beautiful. There are so many parachutes. It’s like, I don’t know, watching a thousand pure white hankies flutter to the ground. That’s if you can shut out the vibration of the C-47s and the fact that you have to carry eighty kilograms of equipment, which is more than what some of the younger GIs weigh. We had to jump before we’d reached the landing zone; Jerry was throwing too much at us. Then we were in the inferno, a sky filled with fire and smoke so thick you couldn’t see your hands, the entire carcasses of damaged airplanes hurtling at us through the sky; I saw so many men hit by their own plane before they’d even reached the ground.”