LENA

“What on earth happened to the old Booker?” I cross to Will and peel away the washcloth I’d wrapped around Sally’s crushed ice. Looking at the bruises starting to bloom on my best friend’s face, I wince, gently balance the makeshift ice pack back over the bridge of Will’s nose. Then I raise my gaze to meet his. “He used to be fun. We were all friends—a trio. Now he tries to break your nose for no good reason?”

I shake my head in disbelief. “That’s not the man I cried buckets over.” Barely able to acknowledge the years of tears to myself, I am darned if I’ll admit to Will it’s possible I’m pining still for the young bold-hearted man I used to know.

And if I am, it’s only the tiniest bit, darn it! Because I have moved on.

I shake off the niggle in my conscience over keeping certain thoughts from my best friend. Say briskly, “Until I met him, I never knew so many things could make me laugh. But Booker used to be funny.”

And smart. And oh, my. So amazingly…something. “Are you comfortable? Is it too hot in here for you?” Something...I don’t know ...magnetic. When Booker is near it’s all I can do to hold my ground against the persistent compulsion my body feels to move closer. Flapping the sides of the wrapper I’d slipped on over my costume, I try without success to circulate a bit of air across my overheated skin.

“Lena.” Will has that don’t-even-try-to-kid-a-kidder look he’s perfected over the years. And right this minute he’s training it on me. The man is sporting rolled gauze stuffed up his nostrils, which makes his voice nasal and not at all like him. But the look—

Well, that is amazingly effective. “A blind man can see he’s knee-crawling jealous,” he says, and even delivered in that nasally, stuffy-nose voice, Will’s tone is flat and authoritative.

Which is also effective. Until the words sink in.

“What?” My head snaps back as though he smacked me. “No, he isn’t!”

“Hell yes, he is.” Will nods sagely. “Booker is damn near beside himself with jealousy. He thinks you and I are an item.”

I stop, startled into silence.

The thought of Booker believing Will and I might be more than simply the great friends we are—and being bothered by it?

Oh, dear. I’m loath to admit this, since it doesn’t speak kindly of my Christian charity. But the idea of Mr. Heartbreaker Jameson feeling jealous ignites a spark of heat deep down in a part of me I haven’t acknowledged in a long time.

Which is not smart, so I shove it away. Then speak the absolute truth. “That is crazy talk. I told him you and I were just friends.” At least I’m pretty sure I did.

No. I straighten. I did precisely that.

“You know and I know we’re not lovers.” Will lifts the icepack from his nose and gingerly removes the gauze. After disposing of the soiled bandaging material, he pulls a clean handkerchief from his pocket and dabs gently at his nostrils. When its pristine surface comes away unblemished by blood, he slowly straightens in his chair. “I’m damn sure Booker thinks otherwise, though.”

“Now, that just makes me mad. I could be having petting-parties with every man in town, and it wouldn’t be any business of Booker’s.” I slather Pond’s cream on my face and reach for the tissues to wipe off my stage makeup. “And why the heck would he care? He dumped me without a second thought. When I think of all the letters I wrote—” I shake my head. “Lord, what a fool I was. Oh, and get this.” I pace a few steps away, then whirl to face Will again, a harsh laugh evading my attempts to keep it inside. “He claims he wrote me several times a week while he was gone, then had the gall to act all wild eyed because I didn’t respond to his supposed correspondence.”

Booker’s claim simultaneously infuriates me and ignites a stupid spark of hopefulness.

Will stills. “He says he wrote as well?”

“Yep.” I stand taller, refusing to fall into the trap Booker’s claim represents. My mother left me on the steps of the Blood of Christ Foundling Home when I was not quite two years old. Not that I have any real memory of it. Still, it doesn’t take that genius fella who won the Nobel Prize in Physics a few years back to track my on and off feelings of abandonment to its original source.

Dear old Mum was merely the first to teach me that people don’t stick around for the long haul. People leave. Always. It’s just a fact of life.

During my sixteen years in the Blood of Christ, the older girls sometimes befriended me. For a while life would feel pretty darn special. Yet, predictably, those sweet relationships always ended the same way. With me left behind as my new friend went into service or married a townie or was just plain turned out when she hit eighteen, to make her own way as the State rules dictated.

Well, I’m nothing if not a fast learner. Okay, maybe not all that fast, considering it took me several crushing disappointments at being left behind—again—before I wised up and stopped trying to get close to people.

Yet the evening I met Booker all my savvy flew out the window. He was like no one I had ever known and I simply had no choice but to take a chance on him. He’s twenty-two months older than me, and I knew from the first he would be leaving for college in a few brief months. Yet we spent every moment we could steal from our day-to-day routines in order to be with each other.

I fell head-over-heels in love with him, juggling emotions I had never even dreamed existed.

“There is something mighty damn fishy about all these missing letters,” Will says, hauling me out of my memories.

I drag myself back into the now—only to find myself gawking stupidly as his words sort themselves out in my brain. “You believe him?”

“The Booker I knew was no liar, Lena. Neither are you. So maybe someone else had a hand in keeping your correspondence from the two of you.”

“Oh, please. Who would do such a thing? And why?” But I take a step in his direction. And concede, “I did wonder at one time if Matron might have.” I feel a glimmer of hope I truly don’t want to entertain for fear it will blow up in my face. But I have to admit, “I can honestly say she wouldn’t have hesitated, because she was just downright cold and judgmental about everything. She had so many rules and restrictions it’s a wonder a body could find a reason to smile at all. Not that she didn’t have her moments,” I add guiltily, because every now and then Matron Davidson would do something almost...nice. Warm, even. “But, Lord, she took it personally if anyone had a better time than she. And face it, darn-near everyone did.”

“What did you do about your suspicions?”

I shrug. “I decided to take my letters directly to the post office.”

“When the hell did all this happen?” And why didn’t you ever mention a damn word about it? Will didn’t need to actually say the words to broadcast the question loud and clear. He never did have much of a poker face.

I ignore the look but answer the question. “It was about a month before the war ended. The same day I saw Booker’s mother in the post office and overheard her telling the postmaster Booker was thinking of staying in Paris instead of coming home.” I shrug as if it hadn’t crushed the still-clinging-to-hope portion of my heart into one big greasy, grimy pile of broken dreams. Despite everything, I had clung long and fiercely to the notion that, once the war finally ended, he would come home to me. That he would have a good explanation for why he’d never written.

I thrust my chin out. “Clearly he didn’t give a hoot about telling me. So, I saved myself sixteen cents by not buying one of the new airmail stamps for the letter I’d come to mail. And that was the last one I wrote.”

The Brasher sisters’ familiar rap of Shave-and-a-hair-cut, two-bits! sounds on my door then, and I jump as if someone goosed me. Looking at the clock on the wall, I’m surprised to see how much time has passed. Enough for the band to have played a set of dance tunes and the sisters to finish their final two dances of the night.

I turn away to open the door and Clara and Dot tumble into the room, demanding the skinny on the rumor flying around that Booker punched some fella right in the kisser. Seeing Will himself sitting there, they look flustered for all of ten seconds. Then they ply him with rapid-fire intrusive questions, strutting, flirting and teasing him all the while.

Will, of course, fields their demands with his usual low-key ease, and even gives every appearance of being highly cooperative. I’m apparently the only one to notice not once does he give either sister a straight answer.

I hide my smile. Because, that’s my friend in a nutshell. So outwardly easy-going some people make the mistake of thinking he’s a pushover. But Will is no one’s patsy. The man is rock solid to the core.

And he always speaks from the place his conscience dictates.