The Days I Loved You Most

Chapter Six

Six

Joseph

May 1944

My wool uniform is sticky with sweat against my back, plastered to the undersides of my legs. The drab olive green Plymouth’s windows are open to the warm salt air but there is ice in my chest, heavy and scraping as we rumble through town. The Long Island Sound opens before me; it is low tide, calm and glassy, but it does nothing to soothe me.

Time became an eerie echo when I was overseas; memories tossed around in my mind for two years returned to me distorted, in a voice I didn’t recognize. Those hazy, languorous days on Bernard Beach belonged to someone else entirely. A boy who knew nothing of war. A dream. The damp plaits of Evelyn’s hair across my chest as we lay in the sand became the wet, gummy blood of someone’s arm against my back in the dirt. The smell of musk and brine, the lapping of waves warped into the stench of gunpowder and flesh, the cries of men.

As we drive, everything is as I remember. The sandbars stretch the length of the shore. The reconstructed wooden dock where I first kissed Evelyn is exposed to its support beams when the water recedes. Captain’s Rock shimmers in the afternoon sun. The dirt path that I scrubbed from my feet before bed kicks up dust behind me when I drive, rounding the bend of Sandstone Lane toward home. Everything is the same.

Except nothing is the same.

Too soon we are here, passing the signpost that used to announce The Oyster Shell Inn but is now a bare stake at the end of our drive, the sign whipped from its chain during the hurricane. It was never found, although for years I expected it to turn up in the sand covered with dried seaweed, or nestled in the rock jetty. My father said he would make a new one, but the inn has been closed to guests ever since. What use was a sign, a landmark to a place that had washed out to sea? They planned to reopen, someday, but that was six years ago, long before Pearl Harbor, before Tommy and I enlisted.

The car jostles on the driveway, and the crunch of the tires signaling I am home churns my stomach. I try to thank Sergeant Allen, someone the army provided, but all I can manage is a nod before I step out of the back seat. My throat is a clenched fist, and sweat beads beneath my cap, so I slip it off and tuck it under my arm. My right leg throbs, my wounds dressed but raw beneath the bandages. I favor my left, giving it more of my weight. It is not the walk of a hero. Hero . The word tastes like lead in my mouth. Limping, slow, hoping to somehow never reach the porch. Not sure if news has reached them, if a telegram beat me home.

The screen door creaks open and Evelyn runs out, throws her arms around me, the door clattering behind her. She hugs and kisses me, her hands on my face and my neck, my body is numb, unsteady in her embrace. She looks around, realizes it is only me. Me, all alone. There is no second car winding up the path, no one climbing out after me. She steps back, registering my expression for the first time.

“Evelyn...” I reach for her arms, and make contact with her wrist. She rips it away. The Plymouth that delivered me vanished, the only sign it was there is the faint crunch of tires, the engine fading in the distance.

“He was injured too. He’s coming in another car.” Her voice is firm, controlled, her gaze fixed on mine.

I can’t speak. My mouth opens but the ice tightens around my heart; sharp edges sinking into tissue. It is a pain I have never experienced—watching her eyes cloud over, watching her realize what I cannot tell her, have no words to explain.

“The telegram said he was injured. You both were injured. Tell me. Joseph ...tell me he’s coming soon, he’s on his way.” Her voice becomes a screech as she pounds on my chest, her hair falling loose from its pins. “Tell me! Goddamn it, say something!” I catch her wrists again and pull her into me. My vision blurs with tears. I bury my face in her neck and all I can say is, “I’m sorry... I am so sorry.”

She lets me hold her for a moment, and then her body stiffens in my grip. She straightens, shoulders heaving, and steps away from me. Her eyes are dark clouds reflecting nothing—no love, barely even recognition. They flicker toward my face, bluer today than I have ever seen.

Her voice barely a whisper, “You promised me.”

The ice twists, shards cutting deeper.

“Evelyn...” My voice doesn’t sound like mine.

She backs up, her eyes never leaving me. Flicking left to right across my face, as if reading something written there. Something written in a language she can’t understand, something foul. She turns and I reach for her arm but she yanks out of my grip and runs away from me. The sun glares; my vision swims, purple and green distort before me, fuzzy and surreal, as she sprints through the field blooming with violets, toward their house.

Her house.

Hers .

Night swims are my salvation. I sneak out to Bernard Beach when I can’t sleep, when my heart is a bolt screwed too tight. It is the only place I can breathe, plunging into the frigid depths. The sky so black above it’s almost a new color, the universe glowing and infinite. In Italy, there weren’t stars like this. The air was filled with smoke and gunpowder, gray soot, ashes of crumbled buildings. When I think of it, my throat constricts, oxygen becomes thin. A woman slumped in her doorway, her neck lolled back. The way her son screamed, caked in dust. Was that real? Is this?

I wake before the sun, restless, my pillow damp and smelling of the sea. I limp out to the field between our houses. Evelyn still works in town sewing parachutes, but then hides in her room, no signs of her except the curtains drawn until morning. I want to ask if she still sews our initials into the silk; if she can bear to write one without the other, whether stitching or omitting both etches a deeper scar. Before bed, she flips on her lamp, a tiny square of yellowed light I know is her, moving around in her room. The window where I used to sling crumpled messages and secret places to meet, a lifetime ago. Does she stare across to the weathered gray Shaker inn, wondering about me?

She hasn’t spoken to me since that first day. Not even at the funeral, the weight of the casket on my shoulder, the jolts in my leg as I marched, the uniformed body tucked inside that wasn’t Tommy, couldn’t be. Mrs. Saunders clutched a crumpled tissue at the front of the church, her face pained, reciting the prayers. Mr. Saunders stoic, shaking each hand. Evelyn mute, draped in a loose black dress, echoed my emptiness as they lowered him, a sorrow carved so deep it changed her features. Two wax figures, two strangers, unrecognizable. One laid to rest beneath the darkest earth, one hollowed from the inside as she stood at the edge of the grave.

The army honorably discharged me because of the shrapnel that tore through my leg, the limp that causes people to stare, to lower their eyes in pity, or worse—thank me. I don’t have the slightest desire to get involved now that I’m home. Not at the navy yard or collecting scrap metal; I already gave everything I have. All I want is to stay in Stonybrook forever, to swim, let the cool water rush over my skin, the way it did before I left and the way it always will. Doctors told me to go easy, I was lucky to walk at all, I would limp for the rest of my life. I can’t accept that, a constant reminder of that day. So I swim, kick through the waves, relishing the pain until the cold and stinging needles turn me numb.

But my days and nights blur with thoughts of her.

Evelyn, sucking the salt out of a wet curl of her hair. Evelyn, holding my wrist and aiming my finger at shapes in the clouds. Evelyn, tucking a blossom behind her tiny ear curved like a shell. The first time I reached for her hand, at Captain’s Rock. The first time she showed me her lists, cross-legged in the scratchy meadow, the pages she filled with ink and dreams. The first time I kissed her, lying together on the dock. The first time I told her I loved her. The tears in her eyes as the train pulled away. How she looked at me, face clouded over, when I came back alone.

She leaves for work each morning, and each morning I pick violets and bring them to her. A reminder, an offering, a plea. I stand where her cobbled walkway meets Sandstone Lane, a fistful of flowers against my chest, heart thrashing like a fish trapped in a net. When she reaches me, I offer them. She stares, vacant, unyielding.

I say, “I’ll be here every day until you speak to me.”

She is expunged of her familiar mannerisms, a floating bubble popped, ceasing to exist. Unreadable, she refuses to meet my eyes before she pivots toward the street and walks away. She does, however, match my stride, slow and labored as it may be. We walk, the air between us thick with uncertainty and silence. When we reach The Arnold Factory, she disappears through the iron gate without acknowledging I had been there at all.

This morning, like each one before, I pluck the tiny stems once more, discard the elephant-ear-shaped leaves, and gather a bouquet of velvet petals. But this time, I hang back to see if my absence registers, or if I am merely a phantom beside her.

Her door swings open and she is there, in her tan unadorned uniform, her hair in a tight bun at the nape of her neck. She crosses the front steps, gazing at her feet, same as every day. She glances up only when she reaches the walkway, and I see the shadow of disappointment, the slightest turn of her head before she takes off down the street.

She hesitated. She expected me.

I hurry, my leg throbs as I strain to reach her. My calf burns and the flames spread all the way to my chest, the ache like lightning striking metal, but I push through the pain.

“Evelyn!” I call out to her, a few paces ahead.

She turns, startled to a stop, allowing me to catch up. Close enough to hold her, if she let me.

“I’m not going anywhere. You don’t have to talk, just listen. Please don’t walk away.” I hold the violets out to her, my breath labored. Her eyes flicker to my hand. She pauses, she is going to refuse. But then she wraps her slender fingers around the stems, grazing my skin in the exchange like the tickle of a yellow buttercup she once brushed against my throat. In a whispering lisp, missing a baby tooth, she had told me: Close your eyes. If you move, you’re made of butter. A kid’s game, a memory, jarring in its exactness.

I didn’t expect her to stop, and now the speech I practiced each day on our silent walks comes jumbled and rushed. “I never should have made that promise to you. I was trying to protect you, to make things right before I left. But I couldn’t keep it, and it rips me apart.” My voice wavers, my hands empty and useless at my sides, wanting desperately to reach for her, to know she is real. “I wasn’t there when it happened. If I was, maybe... I don’t know, maybe something would have been different...”

My eyes swim. Before this moment everything was numb. I see the colonel coming to tell me the news. See the bandages around my leg. See his lips moving and the sound muffled as though I am underwater, I’m drowning, I’m dead. I feel everything then nothing. Seeing Evelyn resets something inside me, and it’s all I can do to get the words out before I’m submerged once more. “I wish I could change it. I wish it had been me. I miss him too. Please tell me you understand. Tell me...”

The flowers fall to the dirt like spent matchsticks and she reaches for me. I bury my face in her neck and the release of her touch takes away all my strength and I sob, shaking because I can’t change it and because it feels good to finally let go, because all I have wanted since I left was to be back in her arms.

She whispers firmly in my ear, my shoulders heaving, “Don’t you ever say that! I wanted you both to come home.”

I hold her tighter, her touch paining and healing me. “Why wouldn’t you see me? I need you, Evelyn.”

She tilts back, our noses inches apart. She stares at me, seeing me for the first time since I came home. There is little warmth in the gaze. “How could I? How could I look at you and not be reminded of him?”

“But I can’t lose you too.”

My stomach drops thinking of my mother. The tumor found while I was away, growing rapidly as she weakens. The nights my father paces, staring out the window at nothing. The inn that is only an inn by name, the paint unfinished and guestroom windows boarded up. They hadn’t planned to tell me about the growth on her side, their fear of what it means, but I walked in on my parents at the kitchen table. My father weeping into my mother’s outstretched palms. And Evelyn doesn’t even know. An impossibility, this thread we don’t share.

Evelyn’s voice brings me back, almost a whisper. “I can’t... Joseph, it’s too much.”

The breeze carries the smell of dewy grass, of dirt. It ruffles the hem of her skirt and she folds her arms against the chill. I resist the urge to reach for her. If we can’t navigate through our words, will our hearts recognize each other in this new darkness? Can we find our way by touch? I search her face, defined angles replacing her full pink cheeks. I say, “I love you.”

She lifts her gaze to mine, her blue-gray eyes rimmed with tears. “I’m leaving.”

It’s as if a gale-force wind comes in for those words, carries them to sea. “What did you say?”

She shakes her head. “I’m leaving Stonybrook. For good. Maybe when the war is over, maybe sooner. I can’t stay here anymore, there’s no point, everything reminds me of him.”

“Say his name.” Desperation seeps into my voice like rising water.

“What?” Her body jerks, startled.

“Say his name. You haven’t said his name since I told you, I haven’t heard it once.”

She hisses, “Why should I say it? It feels like I’m screaming it. I spent two years waiting for you both to come home. Two years . What good does saying it do? What does it change?”

“How can you leave if you can’t even say it?”

She leans back, a raised scorpion’s tail. “Why are you doing this?”

“Because you can’t run away. You can’t ignore what you feel, ignore me and pretend none of this happened.” I am panting now, panting with the effort of holding back all this love and anger and grief. I run to the street before he was shot, run with his body, his living, breathing body. Run through the bullets soaring through the air and dodge each one, run across the ocean now, waves like stepstools propel me forward, to Bernard Beach, to Stonybrook, to this life here we shared. This life I must somehow now carry on my own.

“I can do whatever I want.” Her face is stone; the arms that hugged me are folded across her chest.

I take a deep breath, cautious. “Yes, you can. You can leave, you can run, if that’s what you truly want. But I’m asking you not to, I’m asking you to stay with me.” I pause, my throat raw. Mrs. Mayweather’s School, a mother’s order to leave town. A tumor growing, forcing its way through. The draft, looming and threatening. A bullet, shrapnel, tearing through flesh. My life, spinning out of my control, into hers.

“I have to go. I can’t stay here.” Her voice is cold, even and unfamiliar.

“Then I’ll go with you.” The water rises, I am losing air. I rub my knuckles, a nervous friction.

“I don’t want you to. Can’t you see that?”

“I need you. I know you need me too.” The scene slides away, everything is getting smaller, black and fuzzy around the edges.

“It’s you I can’t stand to be around. Not here, not in this place.” Her eyes fall to the violets, splayed across the walkway. “I thought being together would be enough. But the life I waited around for, it’s gone... I can’t stay, trapped here, wishing we could go back to the way it used to be.” She takes a deep breath. “We should say goodbye.”

I reach for her, her cheek hot against my palm. Her eyes are sunken, features sharpened. “I told you that you never get to say goodbye to me, not forever.” She turns her chin slightly, averting her eyes. A single tear falls from her lashes and slides down my thumb. “I know you love me too.”

“I have to go.” She steps back, the contact broken like a life vest swept up in a wave. The surf rising, sloshing around me.

I can feel where her tear grazed my skin. Gravel in my throat, I ask, “You do love me, don’t you?”

Her eyes well up as she stares at me, pleading. “Don’t wait for me anymore...in the mornings. Please.”

“Evelyn...”

One last look, her haunted beauty like a blade, slicing me open. She turns, and at a pace she knows is quicker than I can match, slips away.

A month later, Evelyn’s darkened window gives me my answer. There is no lamplight to announce her getting into bed, and after three nights it is clear she has moved, left Stonybrook, left me. It is only a few days before their birthdays. Tommy would have been twenty-one. The boom of July fireworks becomes shellfire when I hide alone in my room, the flashing reflections in my window warnings to retreat. I smoke an entire carton of cigarettes waiting for the explosions to stop and then puke until I am empty.

On the fourth day I venture to her front porch, my thoughts a minefield. What if I never see her again? What if she hates me? What if she meets someone new?

Mrs. Saunders pries open their heavy front door a crack, her eyes sunken and skin taut against her cheeks.

“Mrs. Saunders, hi. Is Evelyn here?” She stares at me with distrust, as though I am in on some wicked prank. “Do you know where she went?”

“She didn’t tell me. I thought you would know.”

“Did she move back to Boston maybe? Do you know how to reach her?”

“I don’t know, she didn’t say. All I know is she’s gone too. Now go on, please. There’s no one here for you anymore.” She backs up and closes the door.

I’d never felt particularly welcome inside the Saunderses’ house, but this was something new. This wasn’t a desire to keep the house pristine, to avoid our roughhousing around their fragile decor. My presence is a cruel twist of luck; the soldier who returned, when hers didn’t. How many times had I waited here, right here on the second step by the railing with its hairline crack from a rogue baseball, but now the two people I wait for on this porch no longer live in this house. They no longer run barefoot down Sandstone Lane, dive into waves at Bernard Beach. They won’t cut through the field to the inn, or jump off Captain’s Rock, or exist here at all except in dreams and memories.

I am unmoored.

I drift through the next few months that drag like years. I battle inwardly, a fight I won’t win. She doesn’t want me. We need each other. She said seeing me is painful. We belong together. She asked for space. We’ll never heal if we stay apart.

At night I wrestle with a soldier in my dreams who is built like me with Tommy’s face and my father’s pained eyes—I can’t beat him. He strangles me until I wake.

The morning after Evelyn told me not to wait for her anymore, I left one last note, tucked in a bouquet of violets in a glass jar I set on her steps. Leaving won’t stop me from loving you . She never responded. I’m not sure she saw it at all, and if she did it didn’t make any difference. Weeks later, she was gone.

Something inside me breaks off like an overused hinge, fragments sent adrift. Weeks, months pass without my notice. I float aimlessly through the places that reek of her, of Tommy. I smoke more cigarettes. I contemplate swimming out to Captain’s Rock at low tide and securing myself to a jagged outcropping until the water rises above me.

I have to go. There is no life for me here, without her.

I would follow her anywhere.

I board the train to Boston, suitcase in hand, following the address on a faded letter Evelyn had sent me years earlier. Mrs. Mayweather’s School for Girls, 239 Walnut Street, Brookline, Massachusetts . Evelyn isn’t in the telephone directory, so I start with the best lead I have, and pray I still know her enough to trace her path.

On first look I mistake the school for a museum, an ornate brick building with white Grecian columns and an oversize doorway. A scowling secretary greets me when I ask for Maelynn, then instructs me to wait outside the headmistress’s office, a musty room of old books and plush leather couches. When Maelynn arrives, she is smaller than I imagined—in Evelyn’s stories she is a strong and fiery goddess, a woman who fills a room, but in reality she is very close in size and stature to Evelyn. She wears a navy pantsuit and a knowing expression as she beckons me toward her, her head nodding a command with the confidence of a woman who is rarely refused.

“So, you’re the Joseph I’ve heard about?” She raises her eyebrows and the resemblance to Evelyn sets me off-kilter.

I stumble my reply. “Yes, ma’am. I’m here to marry her, if she’ll have me. I came to this city with a plan to find her. Please, I don’t know where to start.” I wish for a stronger opening, to match her self-assurance, to be a gallant suitor, not a hometown boy offering a weak plea.

“Well, that doesn’t sound like much of a plan to me.” Her eyebrows lift, knocking me off course once more. “Listen, I don’t think it would be right to let you barge into our home without her permission.” She pauses. “It certainly would not be right to let you know she works as a secretary on Boylston Street, or that she buys her lunch at twelve thirty at the little market across from the Copley Square Hotel. It would not be right at all for you to have that information, though I really do wish I could help.” She winks and says, “It was a pleasure to meet you,” turns and walks away, the office door swinging shut behind her.

I am stunned by the ease of it. I left Stonybrook only hours before; I imagined myself searching tirelessly, thrown off course, led astray. Three months have passed since I have seen Evelyn. Months lost to my grief, caring for my bedridden mother, devising ways back into Evelyn’s heart only to bully myself out of each idea, and now I am too close, with a plan and a landmark on a map that leads to her. I am stricken with fear that she will run, that Boston will suddenly not be far enough, that I will force her to retreat. I had convinced myself in our time apart that she missed me too. But what if I was wrong, deceiving myself because I desperately wanted it to be true?

Having come this far, I rush to the Brookline Village trolley stop, still carrying my suitcase and chastising myself for not getting settled first, at least for the night, for showing up with luggage like my decision to stay hinged on her answer. But I am determined to make it to Copley Square while I still have my nerve. The only thing worse than finding her, would be not finding her, so I pray Maelynn is right.

The streetcar arrives and I pop my head in. “Excuse me, will this take me to Boylston Street?”

The conductor grunts, “Inbound train,” and urges me on board with the others, trading coins for tickets. We heave forward on tracks through the city, jostled at every stop as the car empties and fills, fills and empties, the space around me constricting. I grip a fabric handle to stay on my feet, coats and hats and elbows and shoulders press against me as I fumble through what to say when I see her. I don’t know how to live in Stonybrook without you. I don’t know how to live without you. Nothing feels right. Nothing says quite what I need her to understand; I’m not acting out of weakness or desperation. There are no violets to offer, only the golden leaves of October. I don’t want to bring something that symbolizes change. I want her to know I am constant like the sea, tides rising and falling, waves rolling into eternity. So, it will have to just be me. Me and the words I can’t find.

The market across from the Copley Square Hotel is plastered with posters declaring Food Is a Weapon, Don’t Waste It, and Buy Wisely, Cook Carefully, Eat It All, and Help Win the War on the Kitchen Front. I plant myself by the entrance, lean against the rough brick, my focus aimed across the street, unsure from which side she will come. The autumn wind whips through the flags atop the hotel, and despite my wool coat and hat, I have to blow on my hands to warm them. The scent of fresh bread and cured meats tantalize me each time the door opens beside me. My stomach rumbles; I had been too sick with nerves to have breakfast. The minutes crawl until I am certain I’ve missed her, or that I am in the wrong place, or that Maelynn misled me on purpose.

Then, like a mirage, a trick of the eye, Evelyn appears.

She wears a sleeved green dress, cut below her knees. Her curls are long and pinned away from her face, a contrast to her tight bun all summer. She smiles at the Copley Square Hotel’s doorman as she passes, a polite gesture, not a joyful one. Then she looks both ways and crosses the street toward me. My palms sweat so I shove them in my pockets, my body electrified. She approaches the market but hasn’t noticed me. I open the door for her, and she turns to thank me, a stranger in a wool cap, then stops, her mouth open in surprise when she sees my face.

“Joseph!”

“Hi, Evelyn.”

An agitated man in a brown overcoat stands inside the threshold, and we step apart to let him pass.

“What are you doing here?”

“It’s good to see you.” Her face is fuller than when I saw it last; there is something fiercely adult about it, now that she is nineteen. Her dress casts her eyes a shade of emerald, an ominous forest I am desperate to explore.

Seeing her again, here, is like stumbling upon her in another life entirely, as if we could be born again and meet for the first time outside this market, and yet, even then we would know each other. My soul would recognize hers as a stranger in the next life exactly the way I understand her now, in an ancient, absolute way. All I want is to hold her, but I refrain, unsure of how much is still wounded, if she would bruise like an overripe peach in my grip.

“How did you find me?”

“Maelynn.” Her soft lips, those lips I could recognize against mine in the dark, are still parted in disbelief, so I continue, “I told you leaving wouldn’t stop me from loving you, and it hasn’t. I miss you so much. I need to be near you, with you. I’ll move here, if that’s what you want, I’ll do whatever it takes...”

She shakes her head. “You’ll move here...to be with me? Oh, Joseph...”

“I don’t want to scare you off. I know it’s a lot, showing up like this, but I didn’t know how to reach you, or what else to do—”

“I don’t know what to say...”

“Have you missed me, or...is this life here...this is what you want?” I ask, desperate for the answer that won’t tear me in two.

“It’s not that simple.”

“It can be.”

“I wish that were true.”

“I’ll go, I swear. I’ll leave you alone forever, if that’s what you really want. But I need you to know if there’s any chance you love me, I’ll be here.”

She takes a deep breath. Then she meets my eyes, a mystical siren’s gaze I would gladly follow to my destruction. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Yes, okay.” A hint of a smile. “It’s okay that you’re here.”

“Is it okay if I have lunch with you?”

She laughs, surprising us both, and nods. “Yes, that would be okay.”

We share a ham sandwich on crusty bread from the market that is a cacophony of brined olives and cured meats and musky cheeses, a sanctuary of delicacies I thought had disappeared with the war. I am used to cubes of tough beef in stew, cookies made with corn syrup, canned beans grown in victory gardens. But here, ration stamps buy foods that taste like peacetime, like salt-water swims and flowers in Evelyn’s hair.

We buy what we are allotted and savor lunch, that day and each day after. A tacit arrangement we keep even after I start selling suits at Filene’s, my first job ever that isn’t at the inn. I was hired thanks to Mrs. Moretti, a widow with kind eyes on the trolley who noticed my limp and asked if I had served in the war. She offered me her spare bedroom; she had kept it for her son, another soldier who never returned. And she wrote the name Filene’s on a slip of paper with an address and told me to ask for Sal, the manager there. When we met, he questioned my limp, asking in a thick Italian accent, “You seem like a good kid...but you’ll be on your feet dealing with customers, can you handle that?” I placed my weight on my injured leg, letting it throb, and swore I could. He nodded, his leathered skin crinkled in a smile, and told me he needed a suit salesman, and I could start right away.

Once I begin to work, I hop on the Main Line Elevated at Downtown Crossing and take the subway three stops to Back Bay, and then run from there to Copley Square where Evelyn waits with half a sandwich for me, and half for her. We only have minutes together but it is worth it to catch her smile when she sees me from across the street, cracks in the shell she had formed to keep me out.

We sit huddled on a bench, clutching our sandwiches with frozen fingers, and Evelyn says, “You know I can type twice as fast as the other girls? All those years at the piano.”

“Maybe they’ll start paying you twice as much.”

She exhales a laugh. “Yeah, right. Maybe then I could afford more lessons. I miss it.”

“Can you convince Maelynn to get you a piano? Then you could practice on your own.”

“And where would we keep it? There’s barely room for the two of us, and she’s been generous as it is, letting me stay with her.”

I think, but don’t say, You already have a piano, waiting for you back home.

“Can I ask you something?”

She chews, her eyes level with mine, careful not to agree to something she won’t answer.

“What changed your mind? That day I showed up...I wasn’t sure you’d be willing to see me.”

“Honestly?” She crumples the wax paper, slides her hands into gloves. “Every day since I left...every time I walked out of work, a part of me hoped, somehow, you would be here too.”

I don’t say, You always knew where to find me.

I regard her honesty with care, a conversation to pocket for when we are on steadier ground. Our days spent like this, oscillating between what we are willing to say and what we cannot, what we share and what we keep tucked away.

I confess I don’t particularly enjoy selling suits, but the money is fair and the hours steady. I consider answering ads for handymen, or inquiring at one of the hotels, but my job at Filene’s seems easier than chasing shadows of a life we left behind. Rebuilding the Oyster Shell never felt like work because it was mine, but my sweat would be lost on someone else’s building, would be as empty as pedaling pocket squares. Evelyn worries about the time I spend walking through the city, and standing around the store, because of my leg, the limp designating even these happy times as after . I shrug it off, saying I have to push it if I want to get stronger. Other than my leg, we don’t talk about the war, or Tommy, or Stonybrook, or our parents; here in this new life we don’t have to. There are no unexpected triggers to our painful memories, a familiar scent or sound to transport us home. Boston smells like exhaust, like strangers on the subway, rain in the streets. There is no hint of salt air, or fresh earth, the musk of low tide.

Here, we can start again.

Evelyn’s cheeks are rosy, mittens wrapped around a brown paper bag, one end of a crusty loaf of bread exposed to the night air. Our boots make sloppy footprints on the slushy cobbled walk. I readjust the rations in my arms, fumbling, distracted by her. Her knit hat has shifted so I can see the curve of her earlobe, pink from the cold. Snow falls as we amble back to Maelynn’s house, a rented colonial off Walnut Street, through the garland-draped Brookline Village at dusk. The streets are empty and hushed; everyone hunkered indoors beside crackling fireplaces. Her hair is dotted white; I have an urge to steal a snowflake and feel it melt against my fingertip.

The Evelyn I used to know would instigate a snowball fight, or sprawl on the powder, arms sweeping angel wings. This Evelyn does neither, but walks with her head raised, her chin lifted. This alone is a triumph because beneath her straightened shoulders she is balled up under the heaviest quilt, missing Tommy. I am not disappointed; it is merely an adjustment, a change in her I must accept. And I do. I’m learning who we once were is not always who we become.

A wisp of memory drifts in like smoke, Tommy’s last morning in Stonybrook. He was quiet as he shoved his suitcase in the rack overhead and slid into the train seat beside me. His hands swept his pant legs to smooth invisible creases in his pressed uniform. He looked back at Evelyn’s retreating figure as our train chugged away, the air thick with steam and burning coal, and with an unsteady voice said, If anything happens, you’ll take care of her. I nodded, and we rode together in silence as we watched the girl we both loved shrink, and disappear. That moment haunted me after he died, how he looked, for the first time that I had ever seen, afraid.

It wasn’t easy to move away from Stonybrook, and as I walk with Evelyn, even on a night like this when everything feels right, when the air is cold but not bitter, when I can smell wood-burning stoves and see smoke rise from chimneys, everyone tucked inside and warm, there is an echo of guilt in my footsteps. Abandoning my mother, and my father, who brought her dinner on a tray each night, as she shrank and the tumor grew. He sat beside her on the edge of their bed, forgetting to eat. I fetched him glasses of cold water, urged him to drink, but I found them full each morning, a wet ring on his wooden nightstand. And yet, my parents knew I meant it when I said I needed to go, and for the second time they hugged me goodbye. I choked down a sob when I felt my mother’s ribs where there had always been a soft place for me, a cushioned embrace that smelled of flour, sun-bleached linen and home.

Today in the snow, two months after our reunion, I am in awe of Evelyn’s beauty once more. Flakes fall silently, resting on her hair and shoulders. She hoists the bag on her hip as though it were a child. The snow hasn’t stopped for days, and Evelyn began to worry they would run out of food if they didn’t stock up. I was visiting for dinner, Maelynn served dried-out macaroni casserole, cooking not one of her talents, so I offered to run to the market and Evelyn insisted on coming with me.

She catches me staring and smiles back, shyly, as though we just met. I try to freeze time, to never forget the way she looks right now, this very second, the pink blush of her cheeks, her self-conscious smile, the breeze playing with her curls. I’m lost in the moment when she stops, shifts the bag to hold it with one arm.

“Joseph...” A snowflake lands on her eyelashes, and she says, “I’m so happy you’re here.”

I brush a stray ringlet behind her ear, forgetting myself and the unspoken distance we’ve respected until this moment, desperate to feel her skin against mine, and the emotion overtakes me. “God, you’re so beautiful. I haven’t told you because I didn’t want to scare you away, but I can’t help it. You are so beautiful, and I’m so in love with you.”

She reaches up, her wool mitten damp against my cheek, and she kisses me. She kisses me and it feels like it did before the war, before my limp, before Tommy, before everything was so heavy. She pulls away, her dreamy expression a gift I want to wrap so I can open it once more, and I kiss her again. We let our groceries slide to the ground, not caring that the bags will get wet and tear, not caring that we still have blocks to walk. She kisses me back and I have been waiting for this and all I want is to kiss her again and again, endlessly.

She tilts back, her smile etched with sadness. “Thank you for not letting me go.”

I press my forehead to hers. “I couldn’t even if I wanted to.”

“I love you, Joseph. I’m sorry it took me so long to tell you, but I do. I’ve always loved you.”

I wrap my arms around her and lift her off the ground. I nuzzle my face into her neck, overcome with the three words I have been waiting for, the feeling that I always believed in but never once heard from her lips. Her hair tickles my cheeks and I whisper, “Marry me.”

She is silent, and I untangle myself from her embrace, afraid I went too far, that she will flee. Her lips are parted in surprise, the same expression that greeted me outside the market. This time, her eyes brim with tears.

“Do you mean it?”

I nod, dizzy in her gaze. “I’ve never meant anything more in my life. Marry me, Evelyn.”

She leaps and throws her arms around me so quickly it sends me off-balance into the snow, spilling one of the bags of groceries as we topple backward. She falls on top of me, and kisses me right there on the snowdrift, the streets empty and lights twinkling in the night settling around us. I am so happy—we could be anywhere; we could be nowhere at all. There is only Evelyn, her weight against me, her lips, and the snowflakes in her hair.

“Yes.” She kisses me, warmth spreading through my chest, her vow a hearth that becomes our home.