He would never know. Jean had scuttled out of the hospital room in undisguised relief, grateful that he’d been willing to set her free. By August she had become engaged to a diplomat and was looking forward to a new life in Canada, where the man was taking up his next posting.

Blithe, unshadowed, she had brushed away the war years as if they were a bad dream. Shallow, Frances had called her—a woman who would never have made him happy.

Staring at the church door, Rutledge found himself thinking that he was, after all, a lucky man. He hadn’t married Jean in that golden haze of 1914, when war was gloriously linked to romance and adventure, not to suffering. She had tried to persuade him to agree to a hasty wedding then: uniforms, crossed swords, and a hero off to fight the Hun. And he had reminded her that she was far too young and lovely to find herself a widow. . . .

He wondered what kind of life they might have shared these past seven months, after he’d finally been released from the clinic, still a prisoner of his own terrors. And how deeply they would have come to hate each other, finally. Or if she might have found herself wishing that the bullet he’d taken in Scotland in September had put an end to their pretenses.

Hamish said, “She’d ha’ been bonny in black.”

Certainly she would have carried herself with great courage, impressing all his friends, trailing behind her the whisper of great passion and love lost, where neither had ever existed.

Still, he was swept by a sense of loss as he watched her pass through the door of the church, oblivious. She hadn’t felt his eyes or his thoughts. She hadn’t sensed his presence and turned to look for him. There was a loneliness in that.

By the end of that week, Rutledge told himself that he’d made rather remarkable strides from the crippled man struggling to shave one-handed while his sister watched. The throbbing in his shoulder and chest muscles had begun to subside into a dull ache that he could put out of his mind. He could do without the sling now for hours at a time, al hough the arm was still tightly bound.

Another week, he told himself, and I’ll be fit again.