Read Chapter 36: The Missing Pieces

The ward smelled of ether and stale linen, the same smell that had clung to every bed Élise had ever stripped, every wound she had ever packed. She knew it better than she knew the sound of her own heartbeat. James slept in the narrow cot beside the window, his breathing steady now, his color better than it had been three days ago. The doctor said the swelling in his brain was receding. The word *miraculous* had been used twice.

Élise sat in the hard wooden chair, her hands folded in her lap, watching the pale February light cross his face. He had smiled at her that morning—a real smile, not the puzzled frown of a man trying to place a stranger. He had called her by name without her prompting.

“Élise,” he had said, reaching for her hand. “I dreamed of poppies. Red fields of them. You were standing in the middle, and the wind was moving through your hair.” His brow had furrowed. “That’s real, isn’t it? That happened.”

“Yes,” she had told him, her throat tight. “That was the first day we met. Near the mill at Cambrai. You were angry with me for bleeding onto your clean stretcher.”

He had laughed, a sound so rusty and raw it nearly broke her. “I don’t remember it like that. I remember you were beautiful.”

Small pieces were returning. A word here, a face there, a feeling that surfaced like a fish breaking dark water. But the whole remained fractured, a mirror cracked into a thousand shards, and she was forced to hold each gleaming piece up to the light for him, asking: *Do you know this one? Do you remember?*

Mostly he did not.

She had told him about Pierre. The day before yesterday, when he had asked about her family. She had stood at the foot of the bed with her arms crossed, her voice flat and careful. “My brother. He went missing in the final retreat. No one has found his body.”

James had stared at her with such pity that she had turned away.

“I’m sorry,” he had said. “You must miss him terribly.”

She had not corrected him. She had let him believe Pierre was dead, because the alternative—that she had left her brother unaccounted for, swallowed by the chaos of war while she sat vigil over a man who might never remember her—was a weight she could not bear to lift. Better to let James hold the simple grief of a loss than the complicated accusation of a brother still breathing somewhere.

But the letter had come this morning.

Élise held it now, the paper softened from repeated reading, the ink smudged at the creases. Marjorie’s handwriting was neat and unhurried, the penmanship of a girl who had never once been shot at.

*Dearest Élise,*

*I know you are with James and I do not begrudge you a single hour of it. But I have news I cannot keep. I have been volunteering at the Hôpital Saint-Louis in Paris, assisting with the soldiers who are still too broken to discharge. Yesterday a new patient arrived from a clearing station near Verdun. They say he was found wandering the ruins weeks after the ceasefire, unable to speak his own name. He is tall, dark-haired, with a scar across his left brow. He carries a photograph of two children in his breast pocket—a boy and a girl on a donkey cart. He will not let anyone touch it.*

*Élise. It is Pierre. I am certain of it. He is alive, but he does not know who he is.*

Élise lowered the letter. Her hands were shaking.

Pierre. Alive. In Paris. Three hours by train, if the lines still ran. She had imagined him dead a hundred times—imagined his body in a ditch, his eyes open to the sky, his photograph of their parents dissolving in the rain. She had taught herself to let him go, to bury him in the same grave where she had buried her father and her mother and the girl she had been before the war. And now he was not dead. He was merely lost.

She looked at James. He had woken again, his eyes open and watching her. The confusion was there, the same clouded look he wore whenever he surfaced from a dream he could not name. But there was something else now, something sharper beneath the haze.

“You’re crying,” he said.

Élise touched her cheek. She had not noticed.

“It’s nothing,” she said. “An old memory.”

James struggled to sit up. She was at his side in an instant, adjusting the pillow behind his back, smoothing the blankets over his legs. He caught her wrist, gently, and she stilled.

“Tell me what it is,” he said. “I may not remember everything, but I know when you’re lying. I know that.”

She laughed despite herself. “You remember that, do you?”

“It’s all I remember.” His eyes searched her face. “That and the poppies. And the way you say my name, like it means something.”

Élise sat on the edge of the bed. She still held the letter. She could feel it crumpling in her grip, the paper damp with her sweat.

“My brother,” she said. “I told you he was dead. He is not. A friend has found him in a hospital in Paris. He has lost his memory, the way you have lost yours.”

James blinked. He took this in slowly, the words arriving one by one, each one gaining weight as it settled.

“Then you must go,” he said.

The words hit her like a blow. All the hours she had spent composing arguments in her head, all the reasons she had rehearsed for why she could not possibly leave him—he scattered them with four simple words.

“James, you’re not well. The doctors say the next weeks are critical. You need—“

“I need you to find your brother.” His voice was quiet but certain. “If I have learned anything in this war, it is that the people we love do not wait. They slip away. They are taken. And we spend the rest of our lives wondering if we could have done more.”

His jaw tightened. She saw a flash of the man he had been before the injury—the surgeon who had ordered men around like he owned the battlefield, the one who had argued with her about everything from sterile technique to the correct way to brew coffee.

“I don't remember what we were to each other,” he continued. “But I know you’ve been sitting in that chair for weeks, telling me stories, showing me photographs, feeding me pieces of a life I cannot hold onto. I’m not so far gone that I don’t understand what that costs.”

Élise opened her mouth to argue. But the words would not come.

“I’ll be here when you return,” James said. “I’m not going anywhere. The army hasn’t decided where to send me next, and I’ve told them I won't leave until my head is clear. Which means I have time. But Pierre does not. Every day he spends not knowing who he is, he is losing himself a little more.”

He let go of her wrist, and she felt the absence of his touch like a cold wind.

“Go,” he said again. “Find him. Bring him back to me so I can meet him properly. I want to know the man who raised the woman who saved my life.”

Élise looked down at the letter. At Marjorie’s words. At the photograph she had not allowed herself to imagine—Pierre, dark-haired, scarred, his memory wiped clean like a slate.

She thought of James, lying in this bed, rebuilding himself piece by piece. She thought of what it would mean to leave him now, when he was still so fragile. The doctors said he should not be alone. The nurses were kind, but they did not know him. They did not know the way he flinched at the sound of artillery thunder, or the way he reached for her in the night when the dreams came for him.

But Pierre was alone. Pierre had been alone for months.

She stood. She folded the letter carefully and tucked it into her pocket.

“If I go,” she said, “I will come back. Do you understand that? I will find my brother, and I will bring him here, and we will sit in this room and I will tell you both the stories until you are sick of my voice.”

James smiled. It was the first true smile she had seen from him—not the tentative, puzzled attempt of a man trying to be agreeable, but something real. Something that reached his eyes.

“I look forward to being sick of your voice,” he said. “Now go. Before I change my mind and make you stay.”

Élise leaned down and pressed her lips to his forehead. She lingered there a moment, breathing him in, committing the feel of him to memory.

Then she straightened her uniform, squared her shoulders, and walked out of the ward without looking back.

She had a train to catch. A brother to find. And a locket that had protected her through four years of hell—she would need it now more than ever, because whatever she found in Paris would not be the brother she had lost.

But he was alive. That was enough to begin with.