“What is the second thing?” he asked instead.

“What second thing?” said William.

“You said, ‘First of all, you can’t fall in love through letters.’”

He didn’t speak for what felt like a long time. If William hadn’t been sitting up, Tom might have thought he’d fallen asleep. And maybe he had. His shoulders were hunched over. Tom was about to ask again, when he heard William exhale a long breath.

“It’s not like that for me.”

“What do you mean? You don’t like letters?”

William paused again. “Not letters. Girls.”

It took Tom a minute to think about that. Did that mean what he thought it might? He’d heard about men like that, but he’d never met one in person.

He might have misunderstood. But if he hadn’t, he didn’t want to worry William that it made any difference in their friendship. It was his turn to say something.

“You don’t like…girls?”

William’s shoulders were still hunched, but he shook his head.

“Not in the way you’d expect.”

Tom felt a pit in his stomach. Not so much at the revelation. William was William. Loyal. Smart. And a heck of a paratrooper. It didn’t change all that. But he couldn’t imagine the difficulty William must have to encounter at every turn. What a secret to carry. Tom had so many questions, but William looked fragile in the moonlight, a shell of the robust man that Tom knew him to be. Maybe the best approach for now was to act like he always did.

Tom cleared his throat and forced his voice to sound light. “Dibs on your sock girl, then. Looks like she’s wasted on you.”

William turned his head to him, and his smile told Tom that he’d said just the right thing.

“In your dreams, Professor. She’s probably a dish. She’d be wasted on your ugly mug too.”

“You don’t know that.”

William shrugged. “She wrote a pretty good letter, though. Most girls—if they wrote at all—would have stuck to the kind of basics that you exchange on a first meeting. Not Margaret Beck. Heart and soul, that one. Hard to believe she’s related to that blockhead over there sawing logs. You’d think he was a lumberjack.”

Tom pointed to the box by the foot of John’s bed. He’d received another package today and had promised to open it after dinner, but training had been especially difficult. Four jumps and long walks back through fields, followed by endless training on the makeshift shooting range. He’d fallen asleep as soon as they got upstairs. His boots sat untied on his feet.

“You think there’s more socks in there from the girls?”

“If there is, I’m claiming the one with the red border again. Maybe there’s another letter in it.”

“You’re not going to share?”