Page 78 of Two Wars and a Wedding

“I’ll let you get on with it,” said the other woman brusquely. “When did you become so responsible?”

“After you left.” Nurse Hayes’s face wobbled for a moment before she composed herself. “I’ll meet you on the hospital steps.”

Holt waited a moment, letting her compose herself, before asking, in what he hoped was a casual tone, “Who was that?”

“My oldest friend.”

Holt wanted to say that, even in his limited experience of friendship, friends didn’t treat friends like that, they didn’t mock them like that—but what did he know? He’d never had a friend he hadn’t driven away. The closest he’d ever come to one was Paul, and that under false pretenses.

“Why did you say you weren’t finished?” Holt asked bluntly.

“Because I don’t know what to say.” Holt always thought of Nurse Hayes as formidable, but she looked very young: young and shaken and vulnerable. “We parted so badly. . . . I made such mistakes.”

“Well, you’re both here now,” Holt said.

“Yes. We are.” That thought didn’t seem to bring her much comfort. She scrubbed a hand over her eyes and then turned to Holt with a shadow of her old sass. “Shouldn’t you be sleeping?”

There was something so gallant about it, about that unconvincing attempt. Holt felt something clench uncomfortably in the region of his chest.

“If you say so.” For all her bravado, she looked so forlorn. Holt found himself possessed of an entirely impractical urge to slay dragons for her. But he was stuck on this cot, so all he could do was say, “And—don’t worry. You’ll be all right.”

Siboney, Cuba

July 9, 1898

It was probably, Betsy realized, a bad thing if her patients were trying to reassure her.

Not patients. One patient. A patient she’d kissed. Accidentally. Sort of. Mostly. She couldn’t think about that now. There was no room in her head for it. Betsy’s brain felt like a beehive, everything buzzing all at once. She was too tired to think. She felt like she’d been stripped bare and spun around in circles.

And there was Ava, sitting on the steps of the hospital.

Betsy sat down next to her, drawing her knees up to her chest. The view from the porch was beautiful: the jagged peaks of the distant mountains, the moonlight on the sea. One would never know that away up there past the roofs of the hospital tents, up among the distant hills, men were fighting and dying, every step of every trail steeped with the blood of the wounded.

“I can’t believe you’re here.”

“Neither can I,” said Ava drily. “They refused us permission to land, you know—the army. No nurses needed at the front, they said.”

“No nurses needed?” Betsy didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. They were all worn thin. “Yes, you can see we’re just twiddling our thumbs, nothing to do here. I’ve only been on shift for eighteen hours.”

“They sent us on to Tampa. There’s a place called Picnic Island, where they’ve put typhoid patients.”

“Typhoid?” Betsy could feel every muscle in her body tighten. Her vision blurred, fragmenting into red spots. Of all her nightmares, Ava, exposing herself to typhoid, falling ill, dying. “But—typhoid—Ava . . .”

Ava eyed her curiously. “It’s work that needs to be done. But there were plenty there to do it—and you were here. So when I heard that Barton’s ship was in port, I got them to take me along with the dried beans.”

That was enough to shake Betsy out of her private panic. “You stowed away? You?”

“I didn’t stow away; I asked the captain nicely,” said Ava primly.

“I wanted to spare you all this.”

“I know,” said Ava. “You said that in your letter. What I could make out. What were you writing with, a quill?”

“A pen with a broken nib.” They hadn’t been allowed to have pens at the place she was then. Betsy was meant to avoid any exertion, mental or physical, but particularly mental. Total rest, that was the rule. No papers. No letters. But Betsy had managed to find them all the same. Because they didn’t seem to understand that the silence was worse than anything else; in the silence, there was too much time to think. And remember. And mourn.

Betsy wrapped her arms around herself, around the emptiness where there had once been another someone, her throat clogged with all the things she couldn’t say, all the things she wasn’t ready to explain, not to Ava, not now.

“You didn’t have to try to take my place,” said Ava.