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“They think so, dear,” her mother said softly, aching for her only daughter. Kate was sheet white and looked shell-shocked. She started to get up, and then sat down, as her father looked at her with eyes filled with sympathy and regret.

“I'm sorry, Kate,” he said sadly. She could see that there were tears in his eyes, not only for Joe, but for her.

“Don't be,” Kate said sharply as she stood up. She wasn't going to let this happen to her. She couldn't. Or to him. She didn't believe it, and never would, until they were sure.

“He's not dead yet. If he were, someone would know it,” she insisted as her parents exchanged an unhappy glance. It was not the reaction they had expected, or one she had planned. She refused to accept it. “We just have to know that Joe is going to be okay, Mom … Dad… that's what he'd expect of us.”

“Kate, the man landed in Germany, surrounded by Germans who were out looking for him. He's a famous flying ace. They're not going to let him out alive, even if he was alive when he landed.

You have to face that.” Her father's voice was firm. He didn't want her deluding herself.

“I don't have to face anything,” she shouted at him, as she ran out of the living room, up the stairs, and slammed her bedroom door.

Her parents looked stunned as they watched her go, and had no idea what to say to her. They had expected her to be devastated, and instead she was enraged at them and the rest of the world. But once in her room, with the door firmly closed, Kate threw herself on her bed and began to sob.

She lay there and cried for hours, thinking of him and how wonderful he was. She couldn't bear the thought of what had happened to him, it wasn't possible, it wasn't fair, all she could think of now were her terrible dreams for the past week, and how he must have felt when he was shot down. And he had promised her he had a hundred lives.

It was late that night when her mother finally dared to slip into the room, and when Kate turned to look at her, her mother saw that she had red, swollen eyes.

She went to sit next to her on the bed, and Kate sobbed in her arms.

“I don't want him to be dead, Mommy…,” she said, crying like a child, as tears of pain for her only child slid down her mother's cheeks."

"“Neither do I,” Elizabeth said. For all her qualms about him, he was a decent man, and didn't deserve to die at thirty-three. And Kate didn't deserve a broken heart. None of it was fair. Nothing had been fair in the past two years.