My alarm clock is shrilling. I fling out one arm, only to sweep it onto the floor. A buzzing noise now accompanies the bell. I peer over the edge of the bed and see it rotating in a frenzy on its back. Alarm clocks respond poorly to invective but that doesn’t stop me giving it a piece of my mind as I capture and disable it.

Peter Ingram, blast him, doesn’t have any dreams. Obviously I don’t really mean blast him. Considering how badly he was injured in the end, I’m glad for him. “Those days are nicely buried, thank you very much,” he likes to say. “Triple padlock on the old subconscious. It’s all that mental self-examination you priests get up to, James. Not good for a chap.”

But Peter, I want to say. You never flew with 6 Squadron.

—

I had been told how low they had to fly, the Hurricanes of 6 Squadron. But I didn’t understand it until I saw them.

It was July 1942 and the panzer tanks were forging their way eastward across Egypt, each tank dragging what looked like a forest fire in its wake, but it was actually a pall of dust and smoke so high it turned the sun brown. A terrifying sight, even at eight thousand feet, where Peter and I and some others from 274 Squadron were protecting 6 as they worked below us, laden with anti-tank cannons, trying to pierce the armor of the panzers. An Me 109 would make short work of a heavy Hurricane. I was doing my job, keeping an eye out for 109s, but I happened to look down as the sun broke through the thinning smoke and I saw one of 6 Squadron on the attack. He skimmed like a skipping stone toward a tank, his shadow fleeting beneath him. And then I couldn’t stop looking, because shadow and fuselage were so close to kissing, it made my mouth dry.

This was three months after Peter’s wedding.

I hadn’t bargained for Yvette. My only concern as Peter’s best man had been to do my duty by poor Alastair Pearce. But there she was, with her round-eyed gaze, her sudden gleeful grin. Hair that curled up from her forehead, not black but almost. Eyebrows beautiful semicircles that made her look—not surprised, exactly, but alert, curious. Beside the stately beauty of Célia, on whom all eyes rested except mine, she was as slight and dainty as a deer. Instinctive in the way she handled a car. Lively when she listened to Khachaturian, which she couldn’t do without swaying in her seat, and each time she swayed toward me her bare shoulder brushed my arm.

And the way she talked, direct and disarming with sudden bursts of slang—I swear she said ripping—it gave me a pang because it was one of Alastair’s words, and she had known him so well.