Free The Race for Paris by Meg Waite Clayton

would have you print the faces,” Fletcher said.
    Charles ran a hand through his hair, through the gray creeping in at the temples, the tidy, almost military cut.
    “March third,” Fletcher said. “Bethnal Green—that was March third.”
    “Yes, wasn’t that what I said?” Charles answered.
    Fletcher fingered the stem of his wineglass.
    “Showing women the faces of their dead sons and brothers and husbands would no more help win this war than would sending those women directly to France,” Charles continued. He looked to Liv, his eyes behind the glasses white against the deep tan of his long, intelligent face. “Honestly, Olivia, I can’t imagine why you should be the one made to go to Normandy just to photograph soldiers with bandages on their heads.”
    Liv lifted a plate of butter—real butter—feeling the silver at her fingertips as cool and soothing as a shutter release. “I’m not being made to go, Charles,” she said quietly, trying to understand this new resistance in him.
    Fletcher said, “You’d be in Normandy yourself, Charles, if you hadn’t let yourself get strapped to an editor’s desk. You’d be—”
    The dull realization of something passed in his expression. He reached for the decanter of wine, refilled his glass and Charles’s. Liv’s was still full, but he tipped the heavy decanter over the more fragile crystal of her glass, emptying into it the last little drop.
    Liv looked from Fletcher to Charles to the rich bloodred of the wine, the deep brown of the duck, the tender orange and green of the tiny carrots and perfectly round peas. She reached for her wine, the stem cool in her fingertips. She inhaled the wine’s musty cranberry and took a single, hesitant sip.
    Fletcher speared a bite of duck. “You would have gone back if you could have done, Charles,” he said. “If your father hadn’t taken ill. If you weren’t needed in New York.”
    Charles cut a substantial bite of meat but let it rest there on his plate. “Yes, of course I would,” he said, the slight squint of his eyes catching Liv off guard, reminding her of his expression as he’d asked her to marry him, as if for the briefestmoment he’d imagined she might say no. She looked away to the fireplace, the smoke-darkened stone, but not before she heard the truth in Charles’s voice: Charles would never return to war.
    “Fletcher could be in France, too, but he’s not either,” Liv said, feeling even as she spoke that she was betraying Fletcher somehow, embarrassed by her need to betray him for the sake of Charles’s pride, and perhaps her own.
    In bed that night at Trefoil, when Charles traced a finger over Liv’s breast, she pressed her tongue lightly to her bottom teeth, the tension in her shoulders ebbing with the slight motion, sinking into the small of her back, her hips. His hand moved down to linger at her thigh before brushing upward, over her hip bone, her belly. “Shall we try for a Charles Jr.?” he said as he pulled the tie of her nightgown, releasing the fabric to expose her bare skin, releasing the longing. It wasn’t a fallback position, he’d said months before; having a baby wouldn’t make up for her being stuck taking photos of women knitting caps for the soldiers rather than photos of the soldiers wearing the caps in Africa or Italy or France. But now he said, “Come home with me, Liv, and we’ll have one of each. A Renny and a Charles.”
    She touched the curl of hair on his chest, dark still, but with gray sprinkled here and there—editor in chief gray, and who wouldn’t take that position, especially with his father too ill to do the job himself? He smiled down at her the way he was always smiling—at women having tea in fancy hotels, at sources he thought could give him a scoop, at the young New Hampshire gal he’d wanted to charm into working for him two years before, a young photographer who hadn’t even begun to think of herself as such, who hadn’t needed to be