Lone eagle

It was a relief finally when she came home on the train. She had three days to herself to stare out the window and think about him, all that he had been, and hopefully still was. But even she was beginning to think now that he was no longer alive. By the time she returned to Boston at the end of August, he'd been gone for nine months. And no one had heard anything about him, or seen him in any of the prisoner of war camps. Both Washington and the RAF had finally agreed that he was dead.

Kate didn't go to Cape Cod that summer.

It had too many memories for her, even though she had only seen him there twice. She came home from California just in time to start her senior year at Radcliffe. She was majoring in history and art, and had no idea what she was going to do with it. Teaching didn't appeal to her, and there was no other career path that held any particular lure for her, nor did anything else.

She saw Andy a few weeks after they got back, he was starting his third year of law school, and had almost no time to see her anymore.

He loved it, and was working too hard. Several of her friends hadn't come back to school that fall, two of them had gotten married over the summer, and another girl had moved to the West Coast. Another had gone to work to support her mother, her father and both her brothers had been killed in the Pacific the previous year. It seemed to be a world supported and staffed by women, bus drivers, mailmen, all the jobs that had previously been done by men were being performed by women. Everyone had gotten used to it, and Kate teased her parents and told them she was going to be a bus driver when she grew up. Unfortunately, there was nothing else she wanted to do more.

She was twenty-one years old, and soon to become a graduate of Radcliffe. She was intelligent, beautiful, interesting, fun to be with, and well-informed. By all rights, her mother insisted, if there hadn't been a war on, she would have been married and had kids by then, if not with Joe, then with someone else.

But she hadn't even been on a date since he died. Several of the boys from Harvard had asked her out, a couple of the excessively brainy ones from MIT, and even a nice boy from Boston College, but she turned all of them down. She had no interest in anyone, and she still expected to get a call from Washington, telling her that Joe was still alive, or even from the visiting room downstairs that there was someone waiting for her.