She started to cut his hair then, blinking through her tears as that time, the time she’d lost Harry and her sister, came back to her. Don’t go there, don’t go there.

“And you? How is it that you’re even alive?” she asked, not wanting to talk about herself.

“I only just survived,” he murmured, tears glinting in his eyes, reflecting back at her in the mirror as he bravely kept his chin lifted. “I survived almost five years as a prisoner of the Germans, and the only thing that kept me going was you. It was a hell like I could never have imagined, something I will never speak of for as long as I live, and the fact that any of us walked out of there alive . . .”

She placed her hands on his shoulders, wanting to give him strength, to silently tell him that she was there for him, that she understood in a way that only those who’d lost and suffered could.

“It’s a miracle,” he finally said, the words choking out of him. “How a human can live like that, can even exist—”

A haunted look etched his features as he trailed off, and she vowed then and there never to ask him what he’d been through. She knew what it felt like to want to leave the past where it belonged.

“Harry, I . . .”

The sob that erupted from deep inside him hit her like a punch to the stomach, the noise strangled, tortured as he crumpled forward. She dropped the scissors and wrapped her arms around him, cradling his head, her lips pressed to his forehead as she cried over him, tears drowning her kisses as he cried and cried with her.

Elise curled like a child on his lap, his arms tightening around her, holding on to her as if he would never let go. All this time, all these years, she’d kept everything so tightly woven inside of her, never to be released, but with Harry, she didn’t have to hide any more. Finally, she could mourn what they’d lost, what they’d suffered together.

“I’m so sorry,” he whispered against her shoulder. “I’m so sorry for Adelaide, I’m so sorry for everything.”

Elise shut her eyes, breathing him in, committing him to memory in case he was ever taken from her again, her lips never leaving his skin and her arms never breaking their embrace.