Tom grinned and shook his head. “I just had a good start with her parents. I’ll have Margaret home at a respectable hour.”

Gladys rolled her eyes. “Respectability is overrated.”

“Not in my book.”

“Oh, geez,” she huffed. “You two squares can have each other.”

Margaret ushered Tom into an empty office and then she returned to Gladys’s—hers, once five o’clock hit—and changed into the clothes that Dottie had so perfectly selected.

When they stepped into the hallway, Gladys whistled.

“Well, aren’t you two the king and queen of the dance?”

Margaret looked down and blushed. She was wearing a pair of new shoes that her dad had made and her mother had embroidered. They had been set aside to put in the display window, but now they had a better purpose.

They walked out, hand in hand, with Gladys leading. Just outside the Navy Yard, Dottie’s new car—this one a buttery yellow—glistened with newly washed sparkle. On the back, tin cans were strung along the fender and a hand-lettered sign read:

JUST MET.

Epilogue

Epilogue

June 1949

Washington, DC, was festooned with red, white, and blue banners that celebrated the fifth anniversary of D-Day. It was the perfect place to meet. George and Dottie came in from Brooklyn and Tom, Margaret, her parents, and the twins came up from Richmond. And William’s family already lived across the Potomac in Arlington.

The Navy Yard had seen the decline that they’d expected at the end of the war, and Brooklyn in general had suffered. Margaret’s job had been eliminated almost as soon as it began and Tom’s yearning for the beauty of Virginia had started to turn her head toward that as a possibility.

They’d originally made the trip to Mount Airy within a week of his return from Europe to meet his parents, and Margaret found that, if anything, his words had not done it justice. Virginia was verdant with trees, lush canopies of them shading out the sky on one-lane back roads. And the Chickahominy River offered a serenity that Margaret didn’t even know existed. It was bliss to sit barefoot by its shores and let the little waves lap over her toes.

Birds chirped instead of car horns, and she finally knew what she wanted—some time away from the city.

She said yes when Tom proposed a few months after he’d returned and shortly after that, they bought a little house of their own between Mount Airy and Richmond. Mr. Powell’s health had declined while Tom was gone, and Tom started taking over the management of the two-hundred-acre family farm. His father would never admit it, but he was glad that Tom had left the military after the war.

Tom didn’t need words, though. His father had placed their wedding picture in the very middle of the mantel.