an American soldier, and everyone decided that she was arrogant and aloof, and they were frightened by her beauty. After a while no one even tried to make friends with her. They had no way of knowing how lonely she was behind the cool facade of the princess. Only Teddy knew when he read her letters, her pain and loneliness and the still-fresh grief for her husband were obvious between the lines.
“It's amazing to see,” she wrote to him after Christmas, “how they all misunderstand me. They think me cold and snobbish, I suppose, and I let them. It's easier, and safer perhaps, than allowing them to know how much I hurt inside.” She still missed Brad, but it was more than that now. She missed someone. Someone to talk to and to share with and to laugh with, and go for walks on the beach with. She couldn't bear to do the things she had done with Brad, or even with Teddy, they only made her feel more lonely, and reminded her of how alone she was. “I feel at times as though this will go on forever. I will always be alone, here, with Vanessa, night after night and year after year, in this apartment, working at the store, and no one will ever know me. It frightens me sometimes, Teddy. It is as though you are the only one left who has truly known me.…”
There was of course Marcella, but it had been years since she had seen her, and Marcella was part of another life now. The letters that she dictated to someone else to be sent to Serena were always stilted and awkward, and left an empty chasm there too. In effect there was only Teddy, thousands of miles away in Korea, and it was only in the last few months of the war that they both began to realize what had happened. After two and a half years of writing letters, baring their souls to each other, holding each other up across the miles, she finally understood why there had been no one in almost three years. She was waiting for him.
The morning that she heard the news that the war was over, she was working at the store, and wearing a black velvet evening suit with a stiff white organdy collar, and she stood in the middle of the designer salon with tears streaming down her face.
A saleswoman smiled at her, and others chattered excitedly among them. The war in Korea was over! And Serena wanted to give a whoop of joy. “He's coming home,” she whispered, but someone overheard her. “He's coming home!”
“Your husband?” someone asked.
“No.” She shook her head slowly, with a look of amazement on her face. “His brother.” The woman looked at her strangely and Serena suddenly knew that an important question was about to be answered. When the years of letters suddenly ended, what would Teddy be to her?
32
Teddy returned from the Far East on August 3, and as he set foot on land in San Francisco, he was officially discharged from the Navy. His residency had been completed in the heat of the war, he was trained as a surgeon, as few had been in the States, and he was on his way to New York to train for another year with a great surgeon. But none of that was on his mind as he stepped off the plane at the airport. His blond hair glinted in the sunlight, his face was tanned, and he squinted at the horde of people waiting. How different it was from the day he had left on the ship in Oakland. And how different he felt. He had been gone for three years, and he had just turned thirty.
And he felt as though in three years of war everything about him had changed. His interests, his needs, his priorities, his values. On the long flight over from Japan he had wondered again and again how he was going to fit in. For almost three years he hadn't seen his family. His mother's letters had been newsy, but he had always felt light-years away from home. Greg had only managed one or two letters a year. His father had died the year before. And most of his friends had eventually stopped writing, except Serena. His main contact with civilization had been with her, and now suddenly he was back, in the midst of a world no longer familiar, looking for a woman