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“We just have to pray that he'll be all right.” She didn't want to continue to reason with Kate that he was probably already dead. That would come in time. It was hard enough to accept that he'd been shot down. And if they didn't find him eventually, even Kate would have to accept that he was gone. She didn't have to face it now, it was obviously far too painful for her. Her mother stayed with her until late into the night, and stroked her hair lovingly until she fell asleep, making the little snuffling sobs that come after a child has cried for too long.

It nearly broke her mother's heart.

“I wish she didn't love that man so,” Elizabeth said to Clarke when she finally came to bed. He was so worried about Kate that he had waited up for his wife. “There's something between those two that frightens me.” She had seen it the year before in Joe's eyes, and she could see it now in Kate's. It defied reason and time and words, it was like a tie between their souls that even they did not understand. And what frightened Kate's mother now was if the tie proved to be unseverable by death as well.

It would be a terrible fate for Kate.

Kate was silent and grim at the breakfast table the next day, and any attempt to speak to her went ignored. She said nothing to either of them, drank only a cup of tea, and then drifted back upstairs like a ghost. She stayed home from school, and for the rest of the weekend, never left her room. Fortunately, she only had one more week of school, before the Christmas break.

But on Sunday night, she dressed and went back to Radcliffe, and never even said goodbye to them. She was like a disembodied soul. She spoke to no one in the house, and when Beverly came to say hello to her and ask if she'd been sick over the weekend, Kate never told her that Joe's plane had been shot down. She couldn't bring herself to say the words, and she cried herself to sleep every night.

Everyone in the house at Radcliffe knew something had happened to her, and it was several days later that someone saw a small article in the newspaper that he had been shot down.

Military Intelligence had decided to keep it as low key as they could, so as not to demoralize people at home. They said he was missing in action, and the newspaper was noticeably vague. But it told them all they needed to know. All the girls in her house knew that Joe Allbright had visited Kate.

“I'm sorry…,” some of them whispered as they passed her in the hall.