he said finally, his breath warm on her hair. “But I lost two brothers at Normandy.”
“Oh, Mark.” She pulled away and turned to face him. “I’m so sorry.”
“So I have some idea of how you are hurting,” he added.
“I suppose,” she replied. But the truth was when it came to grief, each person was an island, alone. She’d learned that the hard way. She had tried to join a war widows group in New York shortly after she had arrived. She’d hoped she would find some connection that would help her break through the wall that seemed to have formed around her heart, but as she sat among those sorry women who had supposedly known what she had gone through, she had never felt more alone.
But she did not want the conversation to turn to her. “I’m exhausted,” she said finally.
“It’s been a long day,” he agreed. “And it’s late. Let’s go.”
Half an hour later the taxi they had hailed at the edge of the Mall dropped them back at Mark’s house in Georgetown. Inside, he made a fire in the grate and poured them each a brandy, just as she’d had at the restaurant the night they met. “Wait here,” he said, leaving her to sit and think. She sat in the oversize leather chair and took a large sip of her drink, welcoming the burn.
He returned a few minutes later with two plates, each holding a ham-and-cheese sandwich. “That looks delicious,” she remarked, suddenly realizing how hungry she actually was.
“It’s nothing fancy,” he said, passing her a napkin. “But I’ve learned to make due with what’s in the icebox, being on my own and all.”
“Has it always been that way?” she asked. “Just you, I mean.” The question was too personal.
He shrugged. “More or less. I dated a few girls in college and law school, but I never got stuck on one girl the way Tom did on you.” Grace felt flattered and sad at the same time. “After graduation, I went right to the War Crimes Office and then here. Life just seems to carry me too quickly to settle down, and I haven’t found a girl who can keep up—at least not yet. Really it’s just me and my work all the time.” He smiled. “At least until now,” he added bluntly.
Grace looked away, caught off guard by the admission. She had sensed, of course, that Mark had feelings for her. There was something between them that went well beyond the night they had spent together, or even their shared connection with Tom. But it was that connection that made it so very hard to contemplate.
Why now? she wondered. A year was a respectable time for a widow to wait before dating. Tom would have wanted her to move on and be happy, or at least she thought so; he had died so young and so suddenly, they never had the chance to discuss such things. And he thought the world of Mark. No, it wasn’t Tom’s memory that held her up. She had built her own little world in New York, a kind of fortress where she only depended on herself. She wasn’t ready to let anyone else in.
“And you? What did you do during the war?” he asked.
Grace relaxed slightly, blotting at her mouth with the napkin. “I was a postal censor near Westport, where my parents live. Just something to keep me busy while Tom was off fighting. We were supposed to move to Boston and buy a house when he came back.” Those dreams seemed so distant, like tissue paper crumpled and thrown away without a second thought. She cleared her throat.
“And now you’re living in New York.”
“I am.” She could not have imagined that the city would suit her so.
“Does your family mind?”
“They don’t know I’m there,” she confessed. “They think I’m with my girlfriend Marcia at her family’s place in the Hamptons, recovering.” Because that is what a good widow would do—and Grace had always been the good girl.
“So you ran away?”
“Yes.” It wasn’t as if she had done anything wrong. She was an adult, no children to care for and no husband. She simply picked up and left. “And I don’t want to go back.”
“Were things so very bad at home?”
“No.” That was the thing of it. They hadn’t been bad at all, really. “Just not right for me. I went right from my parents’ home to Tom without ever thinking about what I wanted for me.” And when