They worked for another half hour, chitchat stymied by the volume of whirring machines and the watchful eye of the shift supervisor. Margaret stood up and walked around her table to Dottie’s. Dottie had completed her fourteenth star for the morning, compared to Margaret’s eleven, all of them finished to the kind of perfection that looked effortless.

If anyone was to outshine her own abilities, she was glad it was her best friend.

“Ready to go?” Margaret asked.

Dottie got up and put her sweater around her shoulders and followed Margaret out the door.

The wind nipped at their cheeks as they stepped outside and Margaret doubted they could stay here for even the fifteen minutes they had free. But for the moment it was a welcome change from the stuffiness of their workspace. They went from one cacophony to another, though. The chatter and machines and radio music in the sewing room competed with the sharp sounds of welders and drillers that echoed across the East River.

There was an otherworldly feeling to the outside, not from the weather, but from the smoke that poured in from the towering brick stacks of the Navy Yard. On a cold day like this, it had nowhere to rise, and its cloud hovered like an eerie industrial phantom.

They’d walked all of a hundred feet when a figure started running toward them from far down the walkway. At first, he was concealed by the shadow of the USS Missouri, but as he got closer, Margaret smiled.

“Hi, George!” she called when he was near enough to hear them.

“Margaret, Dorothy,” he sputtered, out of breath. His face was beet red, a symptom of the brisk temperature. But even on the warmest days, George turned pink when he was in Dottie’s presence. Margaret had never drawn attention to it, and she was certain that Dottie remained unaware. Yet George’s affection for her friend could have been discovered by even the most innocent child playing junior detective at recess.

He leaned against the iron railing, and Margaret worried that he’d hurried over to them as he had.

George was what Gladys called “a fine specimen of a man.” Every girl who knew him called him “Blue Eyes” behind his back, though the comparison to Sinatra stopped there, as he couldn’t carry a tune to save his life. With a medium build and an admirable physique, he could have been a poster boy for a soldier. But Margaret knew that sometimes a person’s ills were not of the visible kind and George had been devastated to discover that a heart condition rendered him unsuitable for the army’s needs. He’d begged to be given a desk job—anything to help the cause—but they refused, citing their concern that he wouldn’t make it through the rigorous basic training.