“I’m afraid not,” she said, returning the smile.

“Tucker,” he said.

“Pardon me?”

“My name is Henry Tucker, and you are my angel of salvation.”

“I think you’re a little woozy, Henry Tucker.”

“I won’t be always,” he said.

She squeezed his hand with her free one, and watched the blood seep from his head. “That’s the spirit!”

He laughed, almost choking to death before regaining control. “The spirit? What that would be, darling, is Churchill and Hitler having at each other in a boxing ring, where nobody would get killed.”

“That,” she agreed, “would be the proper spirit.”

He grew serious and squeezed her hand back. “We’ll get the bastards back.”

“Yes, we will, Henry Tucker.”

He stared up at her. “Says on your name tag you’re Betsy.”

“Betsy Douglass,” she said. “I don’t want most people to know my last name so I marked it out on the tag.”

“But you told me.”

She nodded thoughtfully. “You’re different, Henry Tucker.” Let him feel special. He’s earned it.

“Are you married, Betsy?”

“Not hardly. What about you?” She knew she was playing into his hands, being stupid. But there was something about him. Maybe because he might possibly be dead within a few days.

“My wife died three months ago.”

“I’m sorry. Truly. In a bombing?”

“Struck by a lorry while she was riding her bicycle. Dead is dead, be it by bomb or lorry. Sometimes I still hear her calling my name. I turn and look, but she isn’t there.”

“It was probably me you heard earlier, assuring you that you weren’t yet in heaven.”

He turned away, and she had to adjust the compress. He winced in pain. “Seems like the whole world’s turned against us, doesn’t it?”

“Seems that way right now, Henry Tucker.”

“Douglass! Nurse Douglass!”

The icy hard voice of the head nurse, aptly named Nora Dreadwater, cut through the chatter and clatter of the transportation staging area.

Betsy straightened up, but continued her pressure evenly on the compress.

“Get that gurney into an ambulance!” Nurse Dreadwater commanded.

“Yes, ma’am. Should I ride with the patient?”

“Don’t be absurd,” Nurse Dreadwater said. She was used to her young nurses falling in and out of love. The new ones, anyway. Before the protective calluses on their hearts had formed.

It was a blow but not a shock when Betsy Douglass went into work at her nurse’s station and heard that Henry Tucker had come down with a staph inspection. Worn down to almost a catatonic state, she’d been given two days off. Now, already, she was feeling guilty for those two days. She should have been here, where people needed her desperately. Where people were dying.

She’d sat with Henry Tucker most of the first day off, and was chased away by Nurse Dreadwater, ordered to rest. Dreadwater had even given her pills to take to help her sleep. Betsy hadn’t taken them.

She could tell by the other nurses’ faces that they understood that in the past two weeks Betsy and Tucker had fallen in love. Love, in fact, was what was supposed to save Henry Tucker. It conquered all, surely it could conquer a head injury, even one serious enough to merit a steel plate inserted in the skull.

Betsy walked swiftly through the ward to Henry Tucker’s bed, made semiprivate with an iron frame and pull curtains.

Betsy knew immediately that he was dying. She’d seen so many of them die in the past fortnight, since they’d stopped coming in from Dunkirk, and what should have been the healing had begun.

“I was gone two whole days,” Betsy said. “I shouldn’t have taken two days off.”

“You were here most of the first day,” Dreadwater reminded her. “And you needed at least three days to regenerate yourself. You were almost passed out, talking gibberish, a danger to the patients.”

“The other nurses do the same.”

“Yes,” Dreadwater agreed. For a second or two she seemed about to cry. Then her features rearranged themselves in their usual stony expression.

Henry Tucker moaned and said something. Nurse Dreadwater leaned in close and he repeated it. She looked at Betsy.

“What did he say?” Betsy asked.

“He said to quit wasting his time.”

“What does he mean?”

“He wants me to leave you two alone,” Dreadwater said. She started to say something else, then cast aside one of the curtains and was gone.

Henry used a forefinger to summon Betsy closer. She moved to be right next to him, then leaned over him and hugged him lightly. His body seemed almost weightless as she embraced him.

He exerted an effort and shifted position until his mouth was near her ear.

Then he seemed to become delirious, hugging her harder and harder with what waning strength he could muster. He began to babble. She couldn’t understand much of what he said. Something about his “things.” His backpack.

“You’ll get everything back when you leave,” she told him.

He smiled up at her, humoring her.

Where does he find the strength?

He pulled her closer, and began to whisper to her about what was in the backpack. What she was supposed to do with it.

He became quiet then, with her head resting on his breast.

Too quiet.

The clock by the side of the bed ticked, ticked . . . The only sound in the world.

Betsy was afraid to move. Terrified of the reality.

He had died in her arms.

Betsy began to cry, which made her furious. She needed to reestablish her detachment and professionalism, and here she was sobbing for a man who in truth she barely knew.

But they would have gotten to know each other better. Much better. If Henry Tucker had survived.

“His head wound seemed to be healing,” she said. “He might have survived.”

“We thought he had a chance.”

Betsy bowed her head and Dreadwater stood hugging her. The curtain was open. People walked past them, staring, then hurried on about their business.

“You have to gain control, dear,” Dreadwater said. “These are trying times. We need you. Need you badly.”

Betsy stepped away from her and stood up straight. She wiped away her tears with the back of her hand.

She drew a deep breath and nodded. “You’re right, of course. It’s going to get worse before it gets better.”

“I’m afraid so,” Dreadwater said. “We will simply have to cope.”

Betsy moved to walk away, toward her assigned ward, when Dreadwater’s firm grip on her elbow stopped her.

“Henry—Corporal Tucker—had a few hours of consciousness and clear mental function before the infection and medications altered his thinking,” Dreadwater said. “No one had told him, but I’m sure, toward the end, he knew he was dying. He left you this.” She handed Betsy a sealed white envelope.

Betsy stared at it, then tucked it deep in her uniform pocket. Two patients were rolled past on gurneys.

“I’ll read this later,” she said. “Work to do now.”

“Of course,” Dreadwater said, with a thin smile. “I’ll let you get to your task.” Her shoes’ gum soles made a curious squishing sound on the recently mopped floor as she walked away. Betsy would hear that sound in her dreams.

Betsy worked with almost demonic intensity, well into the evening. She tended to an artilleryman who’d lost his right arm to a sniper’s bullet. A French officer with a machine gun bullet lodged in his hip. A ship’s captain with half his face missing after a bomb blast. An RAF pilot with a head wound not so unlike Henry Tucker’s. The pilot asked her if he was going to recover, and she reassured him that he would.

“Gotta get back up top,” he said with a smile.

Her sadness, her pity, her emotions threatened to overwhelm her—but she successfully forced them away to the edges of her mind.