Jordie gave her directions to their somewhat cramped semi-detached house on the outskirts of Bristol and directed her where to park on the street. The children tumbled out onto the slushy pavement, already fast friends. Troy was regaling Daniel with historical facts he'd gleaned from the books he'd taken out from the library whilst Madeline was delineating all her favorite sweets for Dawn who'd had very few in her time in the care of her grandparents during the War. Mrs. Duff could be rather severe when it came to what indulgences she considered appropriate for a young girl.

Jordie and Romana toted Jordie's shopping inside. Considering the cold, there was little concern Romana's wouldn't keep.

Mrs. Bosley greeted the greatly expanded shopping party at the door, gathering coats and hats and gloves from all and sundry in turn. Jordie was pleased to set aside her snood and leather gloves. She felt like a play actor in trappings when she went out most days. With Troy's permission, Jordie liberated him of his cap and scarf. He kept his earmuffs on as they kept his ears feel quite snug, he said.

Beside them, Romana shed her fur-lined trench coat in favor of a neat white blouse, inset with lace, and pleated A-line skirt. Jordie averted her eyes from how the hem swayed with the swing of Romana's hips when she walked. Jordie removed her own coat, determining it was to blame for her sudden flush and fluster.

She released the rambunctious children in the playroom upstairs and adjourned to the lounge with Romana for tea and biscuits while they awaited lunch. Mrs. Bosley had been a touch waspish at being informed there would be additional mouths to feed and account for at lunch.

Romana stretched an arm across the back of the sofa they were sharing and leaned toward Jordie. Jordie found reason to dig up her apocryphal packet of cigarettes from the coffee table. Elliot didn't like it when Jordie smoked in the house. Jordie couldn't go to the back garden just now. Romana wasn't there.

"Let me ask you something?"

Jordie shook out a single and lit it. Romana still looked envious.

"Something else?"

Romana inclined her pointed chin.

"Go on."

"You were part of the war effort, weren't you?"

"Am I that obvious?"

"To someone who knows what to look for, you are."

Jordie tapped the ash from the tip of her cigarette into an ashtray Elliot would sometimes use to dispense with cigar ash. Tobacco were a gentleman's indulgence in this house.

"I was a medic. Started as an ambulance driver for the WTS and then they realized my skills were better used elsewhere. I took over the field hospital when my superior was killed and did my best to put our soldiers back together." It hadn't only been soldiers. The danger with the war was that it respected no boundaries. Civilians were as likely to be targeted as military assets and when civilians in the form of assembling work force became military assets, carnage was an inevitable result. When civilians became collateral damage and then primary targets for simply existing, it was difficult to say there was any winning to be had at all.

"What about you?" There was a way about Romana that spoke of war. Not the way the entire world did anymore, where everyone she met was yet surprised to have lived through what millions hadn't survived. Romana had somehow been in the thick of it. "You couldn't have been in the army. I would have heard of you."

"Not army, no. Erm, what with Madeline being so young and having little in the way of close family, I remained local, treating returning service personnel and doing what could be done on the home front between marathon theater rotations. I was WVS." The Women's Voluntary Service had kept alive many a man, woman, and child who might otherwise have starved or frozen in the lean years. They'd risked life and limb to let others do the dangerous work. They'd given shelter and comfort to the newly homeless. They'd evacuated children from the worst of the fighting to take them someplace safe. Elliot's sister had been WVS. She hadn't survived to tell her own tales.

"Were you there during the Blitz? No, you wouldn't have been, would you? You'd have been here."

"I was in London with my mother. Stubborn old thing wouldn't come to live with us while Edgar was...away, so I packed up Madeline and went to her. I could do my WVS duties there as well as anywhere. The need was no less in London than in Bristol."

"Greater, I'd imagine."

"I never measured. We don't. We feed the person in front of us and help as many people as we can. We feed the hungry and shelter to homeless. We treat the injured when we can. We clothe the naked. That's what we did, for years and years. Every night of the Blitz, we were there." 10,000 people passed through their respite centers nightly, if the rumors were to be believed. Jordie believed them. "My mother, she came here after the Blitz. There wasn't a brick left standing of the house where I grew up. Not even she was willing to live in ruins for the sake of winning a pointless argument." Romana produced a handkerchief to pat her eyes. "She died three weeks shy of D-Day, if you can believe that. She never got to see the other side of this damnable war." Romana drank her tea for longer than reasonable. Jordie gave her to dignity of pretending not to be hiding.

"My father didn't either."

"A soldier?"

"We're a military family. He was right in the thick of it all along." This war hadn't wanted for soldiers, generals, or martyrs. Brigadier General Alistair Freemantle had been all three.

Romana took her hand into her lap. Jordie let her keep it. Romana wasn't the only one in need of a touchstone.

"Our children will grow up knowing another life. That's something to look forward to."

"They might even see an end to rationing someday."

"Don't I know from rationing. Nothing's enough. We're all hungry, shambling visions of our former selves, trying to rebuild a world several million people shy of where we started." It was Jordie's turn to drink and hide. "I can't conceive of it. We lived through it."

"I wonder if we did. Did we? It seems like another life, some horrific nightmare lived by somebody else."

"We lived through it. That's all it is, a fact, not a defining characteristic."

"What else could it be besides defining? How many air raids did you walk away from? How many WVS members died? How many were wounded? How many people did you treat only for them to die right under your hands or get blown up the next night?" Jordie ached to move, to pace. Her hands began to shake. Her breath came quick. Darkness danced at the edge of her vision. Romana wouldn't let go her of hand.

"I stopped counting. I had to."

"I can't." Pressure built in Jordie's chest, behind her eyes and she pressed them shut. "Why can't I stop?" Reliving every moment like a film. Seeing it all again at the first smell of shoe polish, at a hint of blood in the air when Dawn's scraped her knee. It lurked around each corner and Jordie had no choice but to go.

Romana took a shaking Jordie into her arms. Jordie didn't need to be soothed, she swore she didn't. But Romana held her and murmured nonsense and said they'd done all they could, hadn't they? As if she wasn't sure herself, as if she wondered. Had they done all they could? What more could they have done? The questions were unceasing. Jordie shouldn't have come home, there were still more people to save. People were still dying. Some would never return to their families, so why had Jordie? Why had she lived? Why did she deserve it?

"Because you put good into the world, and you kept good in the world."

"You don't know that. You don't know what they could do tomorrow."

Romana rubbed a smudge eyeliner from Jordie's cheek. "Your good is not attached to what they do tomorrow. You have done enough to get by. You put good into the world and if it were fair, you'd get good back. But life isn't fair, and sometimes bad things happen to good people."

"You assume I'm a good person. You don't know me very well."

"I wouldn't say that. I know I like you and I know you've been good to me. You lived for a reason, Jordie, as soppy as that sounds. You lived for a reason, so live like it matters. As if you matter."

"What should I do?" Romana didn't know Jordie's past, or what she'd done to shake Elliot's faith in her devotion to their family. She didn't know the whoops she had jumped through to get out with her honorable discharge intact. Romana didn't stop the tightrope Jordie walked to keep home together. "I don't know what do to."

"I told you, Jordie. You lived, so live, whatever that means to you."

"You might not like me if I did."

Romana thumbed a smudge of dark makeup from under Jordie's other eye. "I doubt that. I adore you too much already."