Read Chapter 9: The Missing Brother

The phone on the wardens’ desk buzzed at half past nine, and Maggie nearly jumped out of her skin. She had been dozing in the corner chair, her coat still damp from the flooded platform, the torn blueprint page crinkling against her breast pocket every time she shifted.

“Hollis,” she answered, her voice thick with sleep.

“Maggie.” Thomas’s voice was tight, frayed at the edges. “I need to see you. Now.”

She checked the clock. Her father had escorted her home two hours ago, but she’d slipped out again when the all-clear sounded, telling her mother she needed to check on Mrs. Albright’s basement. The lie tasted bitter on her tongue, but the thought of Thomas alone in his unit, staring at the ceiling, had pulled her out into the blacked-out streets before she could think twice.

“I’m at the station,” she said. “The shelter entrance.”

“Stay there. I’m coming.”

He arrived in under ten minutes, his hair tousled, his tunic unbuttoned at the collar. He carried a flat brown envelope in one hand, and his knuckles were white where he gripped it. When he saw her, something in his shoulders loosened, but only slightly.

“What is it?” she asked, stepping toward him.

He didn’t answer. Instead, he took her elbow and guided her down the stairs into the empty shelter. The cots were stacked against the wall, the benches still wet from the flooding earlier that night. A single oil lamp burned on the warden’s table, casting long shadows across the curved tiles.

Thomas sat down heavily, placing the envelope on his knee. He stared at it for a long moment, and Maggie sat beside him, close enough to feel the warmth radiating off his arm.

“It’s Arthur,” he said at last. “The War Office wrote.”

Her breath caught. “Is he—?”

“Missing.” Thomas exhaled, a sound that carried the weight of months of hoping. “His Spitfire went down over France last Tuesday. They found the wreckage. No body.”

Maggie reached for his hand, and he let her take it, his fingers cold despite the stuffy air of the shelter.

“They believe he was shot down by a Messerschmitt near the coast,” Thomas continued, his voice mechanical, as if he were reciting from the letter. “The plane burned. They say it’s unlikely he survived. But they don’t know. They don’t *know*, Maggie.”

He fumbled in his breast pocket and pulled out a photograph, creased and worn at the edges. A young man in RAF uniform stood beside a biplane, grinning at the camera, sunlight catching the shine of his hair. He had Thomas’s eyes—the same deep set, the same steady gaze—but where Thomas’s face was earnest and careful, Arthur’s was open, reckless, full of joy.

“He always had to be first,” Thomas said, a ghost of a smile flickering across his mouth. “First in the water at Brighton, first to climb the church tower in our village, first to volunteer when the war broke out. Mother used to say he’d be the death of her.”

“Or the making of her,” Maggie said softly.

Thomas looked at her, and for a moment, the crack in his composure widened. He swallowed hard and turned the photograph over in his hands.

“I sent him a letter last month,” he said. “Told him about the bloke at work who keeps a bottle of brandy in his toolbox and about the rabbit that dug up the parade ground at Woolwich. Silly stuff. I told him I’d met someone.” He glanced at her, a flush creeping up his neck. “I told him about you.”

Maggie’s chest tightened. “What did you say?”

“That you were brave.” He shrugged, embarrassed. “That you made the tube station feel less like a grave and more like a place where people were waiting to live again. I told him I thought you might be the kind of person who could make a house feel like a home.”

She didn’t trust herself to speak. Instead, she squeezed his hand harder and looked at the photograph again. Arthur’s grin seemed to mock the darkness around them.

“He won’t get it now, will he?” Thomas said. “Even if—even if he’s alive somewhere, the letter will just sit in the dead letter office until the war ends and someone sorts through the rubble.”

“You don’t know that,” Maggie said. “You don’t know anything yet. Missing isn’t dead.”

Thomas laughed, a hollow sound. “I know. That’s the worst part. I keep thinking about all the ways he could be out there. Parachuted into a field. Hidden by a farmer. Sitting in a prison camp, waiting for the Red Cross to find his name. I keep imagining him alive, and then I think about the fire, and I don’t know which is worse—the hope or the giving up.”

He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and pressed the photograph to his forehead. Maggie watched the rise and fall of his shoulders, the way his hands trembled slightly.

“I write to him,” Thomas said quietly. “Every week. Even before he went missing. I write to him at an address in Paris.”

“Paris?” she said, confused.

“A flat he rented before the war. He was going to study art there. He met a girl—Sylvia—and they were going to elope, but then the Germans marched in and she went south with her family and Arthur came home to join up.” Thomas lowered the photograph, staring at it. “I write to the flat because I keep thinking one day the war will end and he’ll go back there to find her, and he’ll find my letters waiting for him. A whole stack of them, telling him about the rabbits and the brandy and the girl who makes the tube station feel like home.”

Maggie’s throat tightened. “Thomas.”

“I know it’s stupid. I know the letters are probably sitting in some abandoned building, being used by rats for bedding.” He laughed again, but there was no humor in it. “But I can’t stop. As long as I’m writing to him, he’s not gone. As long as I’m imagining the day he reads them, I have a reason to think about the future.”

She thought of the blueprint page in her coat pocket, the sketch of a house with a garden and a library, the dream they had painted together on the flooded platform while the Thames crept toward their ankles.

“You’re not stupid,” she said. “You’re hoping. There’s a difference.”

Thomas looked at her, and something in his eyes softened. He reached out and brushed a strand of damp hair from her forehead, tucking it behind her ear.

“You must think I’m a right mess,” he said. “Bringing you out in the middle of the night to cry about my brother.”

“You’re not crying,” she said.

His chin trembled. “Give it a minute.”

Maggie didn’t smile. Instead, she pulled him toward her, wrapping her arms around his shoulders, feeling the solid weight of him against her. He stiffened at first, then collapsed into her, his face buried in her neck, his breath uneven. She held him while the lamp flickered and the station creaked above them, while the city outside held its breath between raids.

After a long moment, Thomas pulled back, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. He looked younger somehow, the careful engineer replaced by the boy who had climbed church towers and chased his brother along the Brighton pier.

“Thank you,” he said, his voice rough. “I didn’t know who else to call. My mother’s beside herself. I couldn’t—I couldn’t be strong in front of her.”

“You don’t have to be strong with me,” Maggie said.

He nodded, tucking the photograph back into his pocket. His hand paused, brushing against something else, and he pulled out a folded piece of paper—larger than the last one, creased into neat quarters.

“I started another sketch,” he said, unfolding it. “When I couldn’t sleep last night, after your phone call. I thought—if we’re going to talk about plans, I should have something to show you.”

Maggie took the paper. In pencil, Thomas had drawn the outline of a cottage, low and wide, with a chimney at one end and a porch framed by climbing roses. Inside, he’d sketched rooms—a kitchen with a large stove, a sitting room with a fireplace, and, at the back, a room lined with shelves.

“I made the kitchen bigger,” he said, almost shyly. “You said you wanted room for a table where people could gather. And the library’s still there, but I thought we could put a window seat under the east window, where the morning light comes in.”

She stared at the drawing, tracing the lines with her fingertip. In the kitchen, he’d drawn a small figure at the stove. In the library, another figure sat in an armchair by the fire. Two tiny people in a house that didn’t exist yet, drawn on scrap paper in an underground shelter while the world burned around them.

“When I couldn’t sleep, I always write to Arthur,” Thomas said, watching her. “But last night, for the first time, I drew this instead. I wanted to draw you a place to come home to.”

Maggie’s eyes burned. She folded the paper carefully, reverently, and pressed it to her chest.

“I have to tell you something,” she said. “About my family. About the solicitor meeting.”

Thomas’s expression shifted, bracing. “The one your father dragged you from?”

She nodded. “They’ve booked passage on a ship leaving next month. They want me to sign papers. To give my father power of attorney over my assets until—” She swallowed. “Until I come to my senses.”

“Maggie.” Thomas took her hand. “We said we’d find a way. We will.”

“I know,” she said, but her voice cracked. The cottage was in her hand—literally, she was holding it—and yet Canada loomed like a wave on the horizon, ready to pull her under.

Thomas opened his mouth to speak, but above them, the sirens began to wail. Long, rising, relentless. The city’s warning cry cut through the night, followed by the distant rumble of engines.

Time to move. Time to shelter. Time to wait for morning.

Thomas stood and pulled her to her feet, but he didn’t let go of her hand. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get the doors open.”

Maggie paused, the cottage drawing clutched against her chest. “Thomas—if Arthur is alive, wherever he is, he’ll read your letters someday. I believe that.”

He looked at her, a long, searching look, and then he nodded. “And if he does, I’ll tell him she was right.”

The sirens rose higher, and together they climbed the stairs toward the incoming crowds, the folded house in Maggie’s pocket pulling a future behind her.