Free The Race for Paris by Meg Waite Clayton Page B

said. “ With child. ”
    Liv and I both laughed.
    “Having a baby ?” Liv said. “Who started that rumor?”
    “I don’t . . .” Fletcher tugged at his ear with the hand that held his cigarette as I remembered Mama’s words the night of Tommy’s engagement party: A rumor makes a reputation , whether it ought to or not .
    Fletcher said, “I don’t remember where I heard it.”
    “Can you honestly imagine, Fletcher, that I’d be here—going AWOL!—if I were carrying a child? Can you imagine Charles would allow it?”
    The car engine hummed lower as Fletcher disengaged the clutch and threw the gearshift forward.
    “The only thing I’m expecting at the moment,” Liv said, “is to arrive in Paris before anyone else does.”
    “No one is going to Paris,” Fletcher said. “Eisenhower intends to circumvent the city.”
    Liv leveled a look at him. “And you believe that?” Then to me, “No wonder he’s a photojournalist.”
    “I’m not. I’m a military photographer,” Fletcher said.
    Liv said to me, “Of course he is. He’s far too gullible even to be a photojournalist.”
    “No one is going to Paris,” Fletcher repeated.
    But Paris was what we’d broken the rules for. We’d goneAWOL so we’d have a chance to document the Tricolor raised high over the city, Parisians celebrating in the streets as Allied troops marched across the Seine, down the Champs-Élysées, through the Arc de Triomphe.
    “Really, Livvie,” Fletcher said, “you ought to let me take you back to your field hospital.”
    Liv, looking through the cracked windshield, said, “My brother is over here somewhere.”
    Fletcher downshifted again, easing the jeep to a stop at the side of the road, looking at Liv as if he’d somehow followed whatever chain of thought it was that had brought her to say that, to say Geoff was here somewhere. “Isn’t that all the more reason to stay safe yourself, Liv?” he asked. “What would your parents do if—”
    “I might have that cigarette, after all,” Liv said.
    I watched Fletcher watch Liv, his dark eyes and dark brows softened by the premature gray of his hair. He extracted the Chesterfields from his helmet liner and shook one loose from the pack. Liv coughed as he lit it for her, unused to the burn of tobacco in her lungs. She stared at the glowing ember, the graceful swirl of smoke. Her awkward grip on the cigarette made me self-conscious of my own sturdy fingers, the dirt under my nails. She switched it to her left hand, then back to her right. She turned in the seat so she could see Fletcher and me both. I wondered if what she’d said about her brother was true, even. Was Geoffrey in France?
    “Why do you wear two wedding rings?” Fletcher asked her.
    She looked to me as if I might answer for her. “One was my mother’s,” she said. A thin gold band of fading crosses and hearts.
    “I’m sorry,” he said.
    “It was a long time ago.”
    Fletcher cupped a hand under the gray ash teetering at the end of Liv’s cigarette, knocked it into his palm, and dumped it outside the car. “You don’t smoke?”
    “I’m learning,” she said.
    He tossed his own cigarette and lit another, and inhaled deeply. “My brother, Edward, died at Dieppe,” he said quietly, exhaling smoke with each word. “Twenty-two months ago.” Then to Liv, “Charles is wrong about not showing the faces. It’s the faces that make the deaths real. It’s the faces that make people give up that last of whatever it is they’re reluctant to give, to win this war.”
    Liv took another drag of her cigarette, and coughed again. She didn’t agree with him, but she couldn’t possibly disagree with him now, when he was talking about his dead brother.
    “Tell us about your brother, Fletcher,” I gently suggested.
    Fletcher’s moss-brown eyes expressed the words he held back, that Liv was wrong to listen to Charles.
    “Edward was three years older than I,” he said. “We shared a bedroom all our lives,