Mark shrugged. “I don’t know. I mean, everyone loves a good conspiracy theory, right? For those who lost loved ones, like Annie’s sister or even Eleanor, it might be easier to accept than the truth.”
“The girls disappeared during the war,” Grace mused, a picture beginning to form in her mind. “And Eleanor, who had recruited them, went looking for answers.” She had surely found, as they had, that the girls had died in Nacht und Nebel. But she had learned something else, too, that made her suspect a betrayal. That was the piece they were missing.
“In New York?” Mark asked, with more than a note of doubt in his voice. They skirted the edge of the temporary government buildings erected on the West Mall to accommodate the influx of workers during the war. Mark took her elbow to help her around a broken curb. “It doesn’t seem terribly likely that she’d find what she was looking for in New York.”
“It’s as likely as us finding what we are looking for in Washington.” Nothing, it seemed, was where it should be anymore. “Anyway, it might have not been her first stop.”
They were on the edge of the Mall now. Mark held out his arm and she took it, the scratchy wool of his overcoat brushing against the back of her hand. He led her to the right, toward the Lincoln Memorial.
“You don’t want to leave it alone, do you?” he asked.
Grace shook her head. “I can’t.” Somewhere along the way it had gone from curiosity to quest. It had become personal.
“What is it exactly that you want to know? The girls died. Isn’t that enough?”
“That’s the thing. Eleanor knew that, too, and it wasn’t enough for her. She kept searching. She wasn’t just looking for what happened to them. She was looking for why.”
“Does the ‘why’ matter?”
“Those girls never came home to their families, Mark,” Grace said, her voice rising. She pulled her arm from his. “Of course it matters. Maybe there’s more to the story, something important or even heroic. If we could tell even one of these families what led to their daughter’s death or that her life was not lost in vain, well, then, that would be something, wouldn’t it?”
“You wish that about Tom, don’t you?” Mark asked. “That someone could tell you his death wasn’t for nothing.” Mark’s words cut through her like a knife.
Frustrated, Grace turned and started away from him, up the stairs of the Lincoln Memorial. She reached the massive statue of the president seated at the top, seeming to watch sentry over the capital and the nation. Her lungs burned from the climb.
A moment later Mark caught up with her. Grace turned away, taking in the panorama of the Mall below, the long stretch of the Reflecting Pool leading to the Washington Monument, the Jefferson smaller but visible just to the south. Neither of them spoke. Mark stepped close behind her, his coat brushing hers, and put his arms around her lightly. Grace shivered. But didn’t step away. She liked him, she admitted to herself—more than she should for the short time they had spent together and more than she wanted. There was a calmness about him that seemed to center her. But there wasn’t space in her life for that now.
“I was still in school during the war,” he said finally, his breath warm on her hair. “But I lost two brothers at Normandy.”
“Oh, Mark.” She pulled away and turned to face him. “I’m so sorry.”
“So I have some idea of how you are hurting,” he added.
“I suppose,” she replied. But the truth was when it came to grief, each person was an island, alone. She’d learned that the hard way. She had tried to join a war widows group in New York shortly after she had arrived. She’d hoped she would find some connection that would help her break through the wall that seemed to have formed around her heart, but as she sat among those sorry women who had supposedly known what she had gone through, she had never felt more alone.
But she did not want the conversation to turn to her. “I’m exhausted,” she said finally.
“It’s been a long day,” he agreed. “And it’s late. Let’s go.”
Half an hour later the taxi they had hailed at the edge of the Mall dropped them back at Mark’s house in Georgetown. Inside, he made a fire in the grate and poured them each a brandy, just as she’d had at the restaurant the night they met. “Wait here,” he said, leaving her to sit and think. She sat in the oversize leather chair and took a large sip of her drink, welcoming the burn.
He returned a few minutes later with two plates, each holding a ham-and-cheese sandwich. “That looks delicious,” she remarked, suddenly realizing how hungry she actually was.
“It’s nothing fancy,” he said, passing her a napkin. “But I’ve learned to make due with what’s in the icebox, being on my own and all.”
“Has it always been that way?” she asked. “Just you, I mean.” The question was too personal.
He shrugged. “More or less. I dated a few girls in college and law school, but I never got stuck on one girl the way Tom did on you.” Grace felt flattered and sad at the same time. “After graduation, I went right to the War Crimes Office and then here. Life just seems to carry me too quickly to settle down, and I haven’t found a girl who can keep up—at least not yet. Really it’s just me and my work all the time.” He smiled. “At least until now,” he added bluntly.
Grace looked away, caught off guard by the admission. She had sensed, of course, that Mark had feelings for her. There was something between them that went well beyond the night they had spent together, or even their shared connection with Tom. But it was that connection that made it so very hard to contemplate.
Why now? she wondered. A year was a respectable time for a widow to wait before dating. Tom would have wanted her to move on and be happy, or at least she thought so; he had died so young and so suddenly, they never had the chance to discuss such things. And he thought the world of Mark. No, it wasn’t Tom’s memory that held her up. She had built her own little world in New York, a kind of fortress where she only depended on herself. She wasn’t ready to let anyone else in.
“And you? What did you do during the war?” he asked.
Grace relaxed slightly, blotting at her mouth with the napkin. “I was a postal censor near Westport, where my parents live. Just something to keep me busy while Tom was off fighting. We were supposed to move to Boston and buy a house when he came back.” Those dreams seemed so distant, like tissue paper crumpled and thrown away without a second thought. She cleared her throat.
“And now you’re living in New York.”
“I am.” She could not have imagined that the city would suit her so.
“Does your family mind?”