She tripped over a pile of broken brick, a woman’s shoe sticking out incongruously from the mound. Beside it, the matching purse lay, papers spilling from the inside and fluttering back and forth. Around her, people appeared, covered in dust and blood and looking like ghostly spectres. Most were running blindly while some wandered aimlessly, and a few simply cowered on the ground. None were Piotr.
A shadow passed over her head and then another. The ground seemed to vibrate under her feet. To her left, small puffs of smoke and dust were erupting, the bodies of those who had run by her jerking awkwardly and then crumpling to the ground. A pair of hands grabbed her and spun her around. She found herself looking into brilliant blue eyes, and she almost wept with relief.
Piotr was shouting something at her as he pointed toward the dilapidated carriage house, which was still standing. He pushed her toward the building, and Sophie fought to make her legs work, the sensation that she was running underwater making her feel slow and sluggish. The ringing in her ears was starting to dissipate, replaced again by the roaring and shrieking of engines. Behind Sophie, a woman’s scream was abruptly silenced.
Hidden by the wall of swirling smoke that rose from the remnants of the hotel, another plane was approaching unseen, its high-pitched whine filling the air. A thump reverberated through the ground followed by the rattle of more guns. Sophie stumbled as she ran on, panic making her clumsy. Piotr steadied her, urging her faster toward the darkened doorway that had long since lost its door.
They had almost reached the carriage house when the plane burst through the veil of smoke and flame over the hotel. Clods of earth exploded as the gunner shredded the ground beneath him. Piotr shoved her forward, and Sophie landed hard halfway through the doorway of the carriage house. His weight came down on top of her as the plane roared past, punching the air from her lungs and driving her chin into the ground. She squeezed her eyes closed, the coppery taste of blood in her mouth. She tried to move but Piotr’s weight still had her pinned.
“Piotr?” she rasped.
He didn’t answer.
“Piotr?” she asked again, a new sort of terror surging through her. Sophie shoved herself to her elbows, Piotr’s weight shifting slowly from her back. She made a sound she didn’t recognize and struggled feverishly out from under her husband, dread giving her a strength she didn’t know she possessed.
“No, no, no, no, no.” She was on her knees beside him now, afraid to touch him, afraid not to.
He had rolled onto his back, and his dark lashes lay still against dust-caked cheeks. Blood bloomed across his chest, mottling his once white shirt with a macabre pattern of red.
He was breathing, but barely. With shaking fingers, Sophie used the torn hem of her dress to wipe a smear of blood from his lips with as much care as she could manage.
His eyes fluttered open.
“Did you…run me over…with your bicycle again?” he managed roughly.
Sophie swallowed a sob. “Not quite.”
“Didn’t…think so.”
“You’re going to be all right,” she told him. “If you survived me, you can survive this.”
He might have smiled but his eyes fluttered closed again. “Don’t cry.” His words were barely audible.
She dashed away the tears that had escaped and tucked her hand in his. His fingers were cold. So very cold.
“Look in my…front shirt pocket,” he whispered.
Sophie did as he bid, her hand shaking. In the pocket of his shirt she found a photo, a black-and-white image of her mounted bareback on a big-boned gelding. She was grinning triumphantly at the camera, her hair tumbled around her shoulders, her clothing muddy at the elbows and knees. Sophie recognized it instantly.
“You took this picture the first day you took me riding.”
“Yes.”
“I lost count of how many times I slid off that poor horse.”
“Yet you kept…getting back up.” Bright blue eyes opened again to meet hers. “You need to get up again today.”
She shook her head, her breath catching on a sob. “Not without you.”
“Make it count, Sophie. Every day after this one. Make it all count.”
“I love you.” Her tears were falling unchecked now.
A new, distant thunder was approaching, and Sophie crouched over Piotr, as if she could protect him from whatever new threat was coming. Out of the corner of her eye, hooves flashed as the mare galloped wildly past, the copper-colored foal nowhere to be seen.
Sophie straightened and pressed a soft kiss to her husband’s lips.
And fourteen hours after she had become a wife, Sophie became a widow.
Chapter
3
Estelle
Near Metz, France
17 June 1940
Twenty-two widows.
Twenty-two was the number of men wearing wedding bands who died before Estelle Allard could get them to the field hospital in her ambulance. And it was barely past noon.
She wasn’t entirely sure when she had started noticing that detail or why it seemed to matter so much to her. Each one of the men she transported from the front lines was a loved one to somebody, married or not. Perhaps it was because she had always wondered what it might be like to love and be loved with the entirety that a marriage suggested. To have someone simply accept your flaws and love you despite them. Or maybe for them. To love so deeply and so completely that you couldn’t imagine a future without that person.
The thought of a love like that was as terrifying as it was enviable because it could be lost in a second. As it had been for the twenty-two women who were waiting for a love who would never come home again.
Estelle’s ambulance bounced over the deep ruts across the field, and she shifted down to bring the battered vehicle to a shuddering halt, eyeing the rows of men waiting on stretchers. Rows of writhing, screaming, and bleeding men and still more who were simply lying in ominous silence. So many. Too many.
“What the hell took you so long, Allard?” a haggard medic barked at her as she shoved her door open and slid down from the hard bench.
She swayed slightly as her feet hit the ground. “And it’s good to see you’re still alive too, Jerome.”
“You were gone too long.” Jerome de Colbert ignored her greeting, kneeling beside one of the prone figures on the ground. “You need to be faster.”
“There’s no fuel,” she replied dully. It was always the fuel that slowed her down. That slowed all the drivers down. The little that was in the ambulance’s tank had come from a newly abandoned farmyard a mile south, the inhabitants terrified enough to have left everything behind in the face of the invading Germans.
“Rachel driving behind you somewhere?” he asked, standing.
“Maybe?” The truth of the matter was that she hadn’t seen her dearest friend since dawn, and then only as they had driven past each other in the farmyard being used as a field hospital. Estelle had tried very hard all day not to think about all the awful things that might have befallen her. Tried very hard not to imagine Rachel wounded or dead, her ambulance crippled or obliterated by the steady shelling.
Even now, the ceaseless guns roared and rattled, almost drowning out the screams and moans of the wounded and dying awaiting transport. The air was stagnant and gritty, and the stench of gunpowder and smoke mingled with the sharp scent of blood and urine. Estelle put a hand on the ambulance door for a moment to steady herself before she hurried forward toward the next group of wounded men waiting to get to the field hospital.