I gazed down at the fields spread out below. His mother’s house was visible among the trees on the edge of the village, a white oblong against the young, acid spring green. I didn’t know if she was still outside in her garden. She was too small to see from here.

“No.” I turned to him. “I did not.”

He looked back at me with a question in his eyes. I must have answered it because he put his hand on my shoulder.

He said, “Yvette,” and took me into his arms. I pushed his hair out of his eyes and kissed him on his smiling lips, betraying my husband, the love of my life. The turf smelled of spring.

EIGHTEEN

In March of 1943 I returned to the Libyan desert to find that the scorched wasteland I had fought over on previous summers was gone. Instead I appeared to be flying above the hillocks and dales of a fertile meadow where sheep and goats ran at dawn, and where the dry riverbeds were filled with the tiny white, yellow, and violet stars of wildflowers that thrived among thorns and dry thickets. I wished I could pick some and send them to the girl waiting for me in Alexandria. Last year I had sheltered from an air raid holding hands with this girl: it was my first raid, I mean my first as a sitting duck rather than a combatant, and I couldn’t tell whose grip was tighter. I fell hard for this girl and afterward wished I’d made my feelings plainer.

Now I knew her better, I was able to see how the flowers suited her, being arrestingly dainty and beautiful and tough. I had no idea back then what she would have to endure nor how beautiful she would become.

We camped at Castel Benito, a temporary camp because the next day we would move up to the battle lines. It rained, and some of my companions pitched their tents in an orchard but I chose to sleep under my plane. I lay there in the dusk looking up at the scarred undercarriage and the battered air filter and at my twin cannons looming in their gondolas above me, each one longer than I was tall, the barrel alone longer than she was tall. I was in 6 Squadron now, and I had just seen Yvette for the second time. I had declared my love and so had she. When I admitted I thought of my cannons day and night, she didn’t try to distract me, or tell me not to be afraid, or any of that type of tosh. She was happy that they weighed so heavily on my mind. That way, she understood, I might survive.