Inwardly he raged to have to stay on the aircraft carrier as she went to Hawaii. He wanted to stay on Guadalcanal with the troops, but he was badly needed aboard the crippled carrier. And in Hawaii he cooled his heels at Hickam Base, aching to go back as he listened to the news. The battle at Guadalcanal was taking a tremendous toll and marines were dying on the beaches. But in the five months since he'd left San Francisco, he had seen nothing but action in the Coral Sea, at Midway, and then Guadalcanal, with scarcely a breather between them. It helped him keep his mind off Liane. This was why he had enlisted—to fight for his country. When Liane's letter had reached him, he had been stunned by what she said. The paroxysms of guilt had apparently only struck her after he left and there had been nothing he could do or say. He had begun a dozen answers to her letter and discarded them all. She had made a choice once again, and once again he had no choice but to respect it. And now he had the war to keep his mind off his pain, but every night in his bunk, he would lie awake for hours, thinking of their days in San Francisco. And it was worse once he reached Hawaii. He had nothing to do but sit on the beach and wait for the Enterprise to be battle ready again. He wrote long letters to his son, and felt as useless as he had in San Francisco. It was a beautiful summer in Hawaii, but the battles in the South Pacific raged on and he was anxious to get back. To help pass the time, he volunteered at the hospital for a while, and would talk to the men and joke with the nurses. He always seemed a good-humored, pleasant man to the nurses, but he asked none of them out.

“Maybe he doesn't like girls,” one of them joked. But they all laughed. He didn't look that type either.

“Maybe he's married,” another suggested. She had talked to him for a long time the day before, and she had had the feeling there was a woman on his mind, but he had said very little. It had just been the way he had said “we” that made her realize he hadn't been alone on the mainland before he sailed, and she sensed a deep pain somewhere in his soul. A pain no one could touch and no one could heal. Because he wouldn't let anyone near him.

The women talked about him a lot on the base. He was unusually attractive and strangely open about some things. He talked about his son a great deal, a little boy named John, who was eleven. Everyone knew about Johnny.

“Do you know who he is?” a nurse's aide whispered to a nurse one day. “I mean in real life.” She was from the hills of Kentucky but she had heard of Burnham Steel. She had put it together from something he had said. And she'd asked around and an officer had told her that she was right. “He's Burnham Steel.” The nurse looked skeptical and then shrugged.

“So what? He's still in this war like the rest of us, and his ship sank underneath him.” The nurse's aide nodded, but she was longing for a date. She made herself obvious whenever she saw him in the wards, but he talked to her no differently than he did to the others.

“Christ, you can't get near the guy,” she complained to a friend.

“Maybe there's someone waiting for him at home.” Not that that stopped the others.

It was not unlike the things they said about Liane at the hospital in Oakland.

“You got a boyfriend in the war?” a boy with a gut full of shrapnel asked her one day. They had operated on him three times, and still hadn't removed all the fragments.

“A husband.” She smiled.

“The one who was in the Coral Sea?” She had talked to him about that when he first came in, and he knew that she knew a lot about the battle. But a strange look came into her eyes as he asked.

“No. He was in France.”

“What's he doing there?” The boy looked confused. It didn't tally up with the rest of what he knew, or what she had said.

“He was fighting the Germans. He was French.”

“Oh.” The boy looked surprised.

“Where is he now?”

“They killed him.”

There was a long silence as he watched her. She was folding a blanket over his legs and she had a gentle touch. But he liked her because she was so pretty. “I'm sorry.”

She turned to him with a sad smile. “So am I.”

“You got kids?”

“Two little girls.”

“Are they as pretty as their mother?” He grinned.

“Much prettier,” she answered with a smile, and moved to the next bed. She worked for hours in the wards, smiling, emptying bed pans, holding hands, holding heads while the men threw up. But she rarely told them much about herself. There was nothing to tell. Her life was over.

It was September when her uncle finally asked her out to dinner. It was time for her to stop mourning. But she shook her head. “I don't think so, Uncle George. I have to be at work early tomorrow, and …” She didn't want to make excuses. She didn't want to go out. There was nothing she wanted to do, except go to work, and come home at night to be with the girls, and then go to bed.

“It would do you good to get a change of scene. You can't just run back and forth to that hospital every day.”

“Why not?” She looked at him with a look that said “Don't touch me.”

“Because you're not an old woman, Liane. You may want to act like one, but you're not.”

“I'm a widow. It's the same thing.”

“The hell it is.” She was beginning to remind him of his brother when Liane's mother had died at her birth. But that was crazy. She was thirty-five years old. And she couldn't bury herself with her husband. “Do you know what you look like these days? You're rail thin, your eyes are sunken into your head, your clothes are falling off your back.” She laughed at the description and shook her head.

“You sure paint a pretty picture.”

“Take a look in the mirror sometime.”

“I do my best not to.”

“See what I mean. Damn it, girl, stop waving that black flag. You're alive. It's a damn shame he's not, but there are a lot of women in the same shoes as you these days, but they're not sitting around with long faces, acting like they're dead.”

“Oh, no?” Her voice had a strange icy ring. “What are they doing, Uncle George? Going to parties?” That's what she had done before. Before Armand had died. And it had been wrong. And she wouldn't do it again. Armand had died. And men were dying all over the world. And she was doing all she could for the ones who lived through it.

“You could go to dinner once in a while. Would that be so bad?”

“I don't want to.”

And then he decided to brave the taboo subject again. “Have you heard from Nick?”

“No.” The walls went up and froze over.

“Have you written to him?”

“No. And I'm not going to. You've asked me before, now don't ask me again.”

“Why not? You could at least tell him Armand died.”

“Why?” Fury began to creep into her voice. “What good would it do? I've sent the man away twice. I'm not going to hurt him again.”

“Twice?” He looked startled and Liane looked annoyed at herself. But what difference did it make now if he knew.

“The same thing happened when we came over on the Deauville together after Paris fell. We fell in love, and I ended it because of Armand.”

“I didn't know.” She was a strange closemouthed woman in many ways and he marveled at her. So they had had an affair before. He had suspected it, but never been sure of it. “That must have made it much worse for you both when he left here.”

She looked into her uncle's eyes. “It did. I can't go through that again, Uncle George, or do it to him. Too much has happened. It's better left like this.”

“But you wouldn't have to put him through it again.” He didn't want to add that she was free now.

“I don't know if I could live with the guilt of what we did. I still think Armand knew. And even if he didn't, it was wrong. You can't build a life on two mistakes. So if I write to him now, what good would it do? He'd get his hopes up again and maybe I couldn't live up to what he will expect when he comes home. I just can't put him through that for a third time.”

“But he must have known how you felt, Liane.”

“He did. He always said that he would play by my rules. And my rules were that I was going back to my husband. Some rules.” She looked disgusted at herself. She had tormented herself for months. “I don't want to talk about it anymore.” She looked away into a forgotten time when there had been two men she loved, and now there were none, or none that she would see again.

“I think you're wrong, Liane. I think Nick knows you better than you know yourself. He could help you through it.”

“He'll find someone else. And he has Johnny to come home to.”

“And you?” He worried about her a great deal. One of these days she was going to crack from the strain she put herself under.

“I'm happy as I am.”

“I don't believe that and neither do you.”

“I don't deserve anything else, Uncle George!”

“When are you going to come down off that cross?”

“When I've paid my dues.”

“And you don't think you have?” She shook her head. “You've lost a husband you think you betrayed, but you stuck by him till the end. You even gave up a man you loved, and you kept Armand's secret for all those years even though I badgered you to death, and you were practically run out of Washington, tarred and feathered. Don't you think that's enough? And now you spend your every living breath comforting those men in that surgical ward every day. What else do you want, a hair shirt? Sackcloth and ashes?”

She smiled. “I don't know, Uncle George. Maybe I'll feel better about the world again when the war is over.”

“We all will, Liane. These are damn hard times for us all. It's ugly to think about Jews being dragged out of their homes and put in camps, and children being killed in London, and Nazis shooting men like Armand, and ships being sunk, and … you could go on forever. But you still have to wake up in the morning with a smile and look out the window and thank God you're alive, and hold a hand out to the people you love.” He held a hand out to her and she took it and kissed his fingers.