Dottie’s beautiful new blue car was split down the middle by the weight of an enormous fallen tree. Margaret held her hand over her mouth to keep from shouting out as Gladys ran toward it. Dottie, however, sauntered over, and when she approached it, she held out her hand and stroked its shiny paint with delicacy.

“Well, it was nice while it lasted.”

“Nice while it lasted?” Gladys retorted. “Dottie, you had it for a few days. It’s totaled. There’s no Easter Morning resurrection in its future.”

Dottie maintained the serene look on her face. “It’s a shame. I’m not disagreeing with you. But it’s difficult to be ruffled by the loss of something I never expected to have in the first place when our Long Island neighbors have lost their homes. Their homes. And our boys have lost their lives.”

A chill went through Margaret, one that carried humility in its wake. This is why they called her Saint Dorothy. Of course she would have the perspective of seeing a thing as a thing, even if it was a beautiful car. She had lost the love of her life. Margaret had lost her brother. It was nothing in comparison. But Dottie was the one who always brought them back to this better place.

Hurricane Gladys. Saint Dorothy. What nickname would they give her?

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-One

October 1944

Supplies! Word had gone out among the troops the day before that a shipment full of cigarettes and near beer and toothpaste and all the goods they’d missed had arrived.

Tom was most excited about the air mail paper.

He reread the letter he’d written to Margaret, cranking a flashlight every few minutes in order to see better. He’d woken thinking about her and couldn’t go back to sleep.

There were some things he would never tell her. He would never reveal that sometimes he thought it would be better to die like William and John than to continue on Hell’s Highway, as this offense was being called. He did not want her to know that cold feet and wet boots made him question everything he’d believed about himself and his future in the military. That it was not due to the discomfort of them—or of the many hardships they’d endured—but in the realization that as an officer someday, he would lose men—good men—to these evils and these elements. And the thought of it tortured him.

If despair was the language of the devil’s land, he’d become fluent.

Margaret, on the other hand, was his reason for hope in the darkness. His lifeline to believe that there were better days ahead. Because when he wrote of them, it made them real.

He held the flashlight higher until its beam shone just over the page.

Dearest Margaret, he’d begun.