Read Chapter 28: The Long Road to Recovery

The hospital train smelled of iodine and coal smoke, and James’s hand was fever-warm in hers as they stood on the platform at Boulogne. The grey Channel stretched beyond the pier, indifferent, patient.

“You’ll write,” he said. Not a question.

“Every day.” Élise pressed his fingers. “And you’ll heal. Properly this time. No sneaking back to the trenches before the wound has closed.”

A ghost of his old smile crossed his face. “You sound like my commanding officer.”

“Someone must.” She reached up and adjusted his collar, though it needed no adjusting. It was a thing she had done for her mother once, before the war, a gesture of tenderness that had always embarrassed her. Now she did it because she needed something to do with her hands. They had stopped trembling, at least for the moment.

The whistle shrieked. Orderlies began loading the last of the stretchers.

James’s jaw tightened. “Élise. About your brother.”

“Don’t.” She shook her head, the word firmer than she felt. “You’ll be no good to him dead, or—or crippled. He has waited this long. He can wait a little more.”

“And Leclair’s intelligence? The Russian front?”

“Is not your concern while you are in a hospital bed in Kent.” She forced brightness into her voice. “Write to me about the weather. About English tea. About the proper way to take a scone.”

“I’ll write to you about everything,” he said, and something in the way he said it made her chest ache.

The whistle shrieked again. A nurse touched her elbow. “Mademoiselle Moreau—they need you at the far wagon.”

She did not look away from James. “I’ll be at Ypres. Forward aid post, near Sint-Jan. They have promised me good work.”

“I know where Ypres is.” His voice was rough. “Élise—take care. The snipers, the gas—”

“I have survived Dr. Vogel’s hospitality. I believe I can survive the mud of Belgium.” She smiled, and it almost held. “Go. Get well. Come back and yell at me about protocol.”

He laughed, short and broken. Then he pulled her to him, pressing a kiss to her forehead. The motion jostled his bandaged shoulder, and he winced, but did not let go.

“Come back,” she whispered against his tunic.

“I always will.”

---

The post at Sint-Jan was a collection of sandbagged dugouts strung along a shattered farmhouse, the air thick with the smell of latrines, cordite, and the peculiar sweet rot that followed the autumn rains. Élise worked eighteen-hour days.

She wrote to him in the brief candle-lit gaps between shifts, her hands smudged with iodine, the nib scratching across cheap paper. She told him about Corporal Dawes, who learned to walk again with a leg held together by pins. About the shell that landed forty yards from the dressing station and killed only a mule. About the Red Cross parcels that tasted like home and the German prisoners who helped dig the new latrines, their eyes hollow.

He wrote back from a red-brick hospital outside Canterbury, the words acquiring strength as the weeks passed. His first letter was two lines of shaky script. By November he was describing the English fog, the tyrannical blueness of the sky after years of French grey, the way the nurses fussed over him until he wanted to scream.

*I miss the mud,* he wrote. *I miss the sound of your voice telling me I am being foolish. I miss the way you say my name, as if it matters.*

*It matters,* she wrote back, and folded the letter before she could say more.

---

The locket came undone on a cold Tuesday, during a lull between bombardments. She had worn it since the salvage, always meaning to repair the clasp, never quite finding the time. It caught on the edge of her apron as she bent over a basin of dressings, and the little silver oval sprang open, spilling its contents into the grey water.

She fished the photograph out with trembling fingers. The woman stared up at her—not the woman James had called his fiancée, the fair-haired girl in the drawing room whose name he had never spoken. This was a different face. Dark hair swept up. A serious mouth. The uniform of a French *infirmière-major* in the collar.

Élise turned the photo over. On the back, a name in faded ink:

*Marguerite.*

The letter he had never sent. The photograph he had never given.

She stood in the wet light of the dugout, water dripping from her fingers, and felt the ground shift beneath her.

Marguerite. A French name. A French nurse’s uniform, pre-war cut. A woman he had carried through years of war, tucked against his heart.

Élise put the photograph back in the locket. She snapped the clasp shut and wore it still, because to remove it would be to acknowledge the question she was not ready to ask.

But that night, she wrote to him differently. She wrote about the weather, the wounded, the mundane machinery of survival. She did not ask about Marguerite. She could not.

---

His reply came ten days later, thick with pages.

*My darling Élise,*

*Your last letter frightened me. Not because of what you said—you said nothing, which is precisely the problem. I have learned to read you. I know when you are hiding.*

*There is something I should have told you along ago. I am a coward. I have been a coward about this, the way a man can be a coward about the small things even when the large things have lost their power to terrify him.*

*Her name was Marguerite. She was a nurse, like you. I met her in ’15, at a field hospital near Amiens. She was French, married to a man serving in the German army—an Alsatian conscripted against his will. She refused to divorce him. She refused to speak of him with bitterness. She believed he would come home.*

*She was killed in a gas attack in the spring of ’16. Not by the Germans. By our own artillery, overshooting the line. I was not there. I was evacuated with a fever three days before. I carried her photograph with me because I could not carry her. Because I could not save her. And because I did not tell her I loved her before she died.*

*I am telling you now, because I will not make that mistake again.*

*I love you, Élise Moreau. Not the way I loved her. I loved her the way a man loves a wound he cannot understand. I love you the way a man loves the ground he intends to stand on. The war will end. I intend to stand on that ground with you.*

*They are releasing me next month. I have not asked for a posting. I have demanded one—Ypres, forward zone, no more convalescing in England while you risk your life in the mud. I will return to you before the new year if I have to swim the Channel.*

*Wait for me.*

*James*

---

Élise read the letter three times. The locket sat cold against her collarbone.

Marguerite. A ghost. A woman he had loved and lost. Not a betrayal.

And yet the ground did not quite settle beneath her. Because she knew what it was to love a ghost. She had been grieving Pierre for two years, mourning her brother as dead while he walked the earth in a German prison, changed and unrecognizing. She knew what it was to place your heart in a tomb.

She wrote back a single line and sent it before she could think better of it:

*I will wait. But when you return, you must help me bring my brother home. I cannot love a man who is willing to abandon his own ghosts.*

The candle guttered. Outside, the guns began again, a distant rumbling that had become the heartbeat of her nights.

She thought of James on a hospital ship, somewhere in the grey Channel. She thought of Marguerite in a French uniform, dead under friendly fire. She thought of Pierre’s face, blank and unseeing, pulled away by German hands.

Somewhere, in the dark of a dugout near Ypres, she put her hand on the locket and prayed to a God she had stopped believing in that she would not have to bury another loved one before the war was done.