you, Garrett. I really do. You’re kind and sweet and you make me laugh, and you never told me I had to stop taking pictures . . . or thought I was a tramp because I liked rolling around in the backseat as much as you. But—”
“What are you getting at?” Garrett said.
“We’re good together.” Jordan made herself go on before she lost her nerve. “But is it love, or is it habit?”
A long silence. Jordan looked at him, steadily. Garrett looked at his folded arms. Finally he looked up.
“I’d like my ring back.”
Well, Jordan thought, that answers that. She pried the diamond off her finger, feeling a lump in her throat. “I’m sorry,” she began, but he turned around and started for the stairs, back straight and angry.
He stopped at the door, looking down from the top of the stairs. “I’ll break it to my family if you break it to yours.”
“Tell your mother I’m sorry. She’s been wonderful to me, I—” Jordan stopped before guilty babbling set in. She looked away, down at A Pilot at Work. “Garrett . . .”
“What?” His voice was as stiff as his back.
“When you took me flying, you looked so happy.” She pointed to the photograph of him. “That’s the real Garrett Byrne. The one in the overalls, not the one standing in front of me now in a suit. You should go back to flying, not—”
“Take your advice and shove it,” Garrett said and slammed out of the darkroom.
Jordan let out a long breath, looking down at her naked ring finger. Her eyes burned, and she wondered if she was going to cry. Five years, she thought. Five years.
“Back to work, J. Bryde,” she said aloud, blotting her eyes. “This career isn’t going to start itself.”
Chapter 34
Nina
July 1944
Polish front
The Germans are falling back! Clear into Poland—” But the Fritzes fought, clawing for every step.
A frigid winter had gone by, teeth chattering behind mole-fur masks on night runs; Nina’s navigator, Galya, lost a toe to frostbite, trying to laugh it off: “How are my dancing sandals going to look?” Yelena got clipped through the calf by ground fire soon after the year turned, and Nina’s heart climbed up her throat to see her lover come limping off the field with one arm around her navigator Zoya’s neck for support. “It’s nothing,” Yelena reassured even as Nina crashed to her knees and began running her fingers over the exit wound. “Straight through the muscle and out, stop fussing!”
Spring melted into summer, less flying, more sleep, but they all seemed to have lost their ability to sleep longer than a few hours at a stretch. “I get such headaches,” Zoya cried, and Nina tried not to feel the prick of jealousy when Yelena hugged her tight and crooned reassurance. You were close to your navigator when you were a pilot; it was inevitable. You loved her. Don’t love her more than me, Yelenushka. Red-haired Zoya, whose husband had died fighting in Stalingrad, who had two children in Moscow living with her mother—children whose pictures Yelena exclaimed over wistfully . . .
She doesn’t love anyone more than you, Nina told herself. They still crept off to lie together under the Rusalka’s wing, kissing and talking nonsense. Nothing had changed.
Only because you don’t bring up anything that might upset the balance.
They were flying over Poland by summer: a land of smoke and ruin and mud. A land that had been raped, Nina thought. The summer rains had churned the ground into a deep, malevolent glue that sucked on U-2 wheels and bogged fuel trucks. In their crude dugouts, the walls streamed water and the mud came up to the shin. “But look at this—” Yelena held out a fragile red flower. “Corn poppies. I found some blooming in the field behind the airdrome.”
Touched almost to tears, Nina stared at the poppy already wilting on the stem. I’m so tired.
Does anyone care, rusalka? Nina’s father sneered. So she kissed Yelena, threaded the poppy through her overall front, swallowed another Coca-Cola tablet, and kept going.
“IT SHOULD BE a crystal glass, not a soup can—”
“We don’t have a crystal glass. We’re lucky Bershanskaia let us have the vodka!”
The Night Witches laughed, oil smeared and radiant, exhaustion evaporated. The word had come down as they trooped into the canteen at dawn: Nina Markova and four other pilots were to be made Heroes of the Soviet Union.
It wouldn’t be official until the ceremony, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t make the