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Back When We Meet Again Save as PDF
Chapters (57)
  1. Cover
  2. Dedication
  3. Epigraph
  4. Prologue
  5. One
  6. Two
  7. Three
  8. Four
  9. Five
  10. Six
  11. Seven
  12. Eight
  13. Nine
  14. Ten
  15. Eleven
  16. Twelve
  17. Thirteen
  18. Fourteen
  19. Fifteen
  20. Sixteen
  21. Seventeen
  22. Eighteen
  23. Nineteen
  24. Twenty
  25. Twenty-one
  26. Twenty-two
  27. Twenty-three
  28. Twenty-four
  29. Twenty-five
  30. Twenty-six
  31. Twenty-seven
  32. Twenty-eight
  33. Twenty-nine
  34. Thirty
  35. Thirty-one
  36. Thirty-two
  37. Thirty-three
  38. Thirty-four
  39. Thirty-five
  40. Thirty-six
  41. Thirty-seven
  42. Thirty-eight
  43. Thirty-nine
  44. Forty
  45. Forty-one
  46. Forty-two
  47. Forty-three
  48. Forty-four
  49. Forty-five
  50. AUTHOR’S NOTE
  51. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  52. POPULAR BOOKS FROM THE ERA
  53. When We Meet Again
  54. A Conversation with Caroline Beecham about When We Meet Again
  55. Discussion Guide
  56. ABOUT THE AUTHOR
  57. What’s next onyour reading list?

It was almost midnight before he was able to prize himself away.

“Oh, you poor thing, you should have said something earlier,” she said, giggling at his twitching eye. “What time is it in London?”

“Seven in the morning, so I’ve got roughly forty-eight hours of sleep to catch up on. And then some.” He yawned.

“That’s a shame,” she said, stroking his face. “I was going to ask you to come back to my place, but I suppose we’d better call it a night and let you get some rest.”

“I’ll drop you off, if that’s all right,” he said, as she pulled him in for another kiss.

When their taxi turned on to Madison, her hand slid into his and squeezed his fingers. “It’s divine to have you back—I’ve missed you,” she said as she nuzzled her head into his shoulder.

He looked down at the soft smile playing on her lips. “Yes. I’ve missed you too.”

But there hadn’t been butterflies when he’d first seen her in the Angel. Desire, yes, a fondness and a longing, yes, but he hadn’t felt compelled to take her in his arms—which was just as well, considering the large marble table that had stood between them.

He glanced out of the window at the lights of his city spinning by. After six weeks in London he no longer identified with these people, Virginia’s people, and he found it hard to imagine spending the rest of his life with them. As the implications registered, an uneasy feeling settled inside his chest. Virginia hadn’t changed, but he had, and he didn’t think he could ever change back.

Twenty-nine

London, April 26, 1943

Alice pulled her collar tighter and braced for the downpour as the sky darkened, the air grew thicker and the first droplets began to fall. She hadn’t slept again—she’d been unable to let go of the troubling thought that Frank and Beatrice Pritchard had been released from prison and were back preying on children. They could even be the couple who’d been in contact with her mother. So she’d tracked them down and was navigating as best she could with her scribbled map, passing row upon row of dreary interchangeable homes either side of the street. Most were empty, curtains pulled halfway across their cracked windowpanes. Leytonstone hadn’t escaped the bombing raids, but even in the fading light the grimness of the area was evident in its run-down houses and disconsolate atmosphere. It was an area of northeast London she wasn’t familiar with, and she counted herself lucky she hadn’t had reason to visit before.