Lisette had used the chute to make a pallet on the bare earth floor. There were supplies—an earthenware jug of fresh water, a basket of food, some bandages, and a jar of yellow powder. His M1A1 carbine was stowed behind his reserve chute, which had been unstrapped from him. Folded under the reserve was his aviator’s kit bag.

She used a pair of scissors to cut away the leg of his trousers. The gouge was deep, the flesh ragged and inflamed around the opening, but the bleeding had stopped. She paused, catching his eye. Then her gaze flicked to his harness belt. Somehow he understood what she meant, and it made him wish he’d stayed unconscious. His hand shook a little as he unbuckled and tugged the belt free. He placed the thick leather between his teeth and clamped down hard. A sharp smell wafted in the air.

“Antiseptique,” she said. “In English, it is the same, no?”

He nodded. Oh, sweet Jesus, he thought.

In training, they had told him to expect pain—from extreme missions, from wounds, or worse—under torture. Like all the fresh-faced boys eagerly signing up for adventure, Hank had dismissed the advice, too busy dreaming of falling from the sky like a leaf on the wind. He was going to see places and meet people so far from Vermont that they might as well be on a different planet.

He told everyone he was enlisting—with special permission to sign up at age seventeen—for the sake of God, country, and freedom. Deep down, he admitted only to himself that his real reason for going to war had been to escape Mildred Deacon.

Oh, she was pretty enough, and sweet as all get-out. Too sweet for Hank. She wanted to settle down and have babies and keep house while he went off to work at the quarry every day. Now, there was no shame in the family business—they were stonecutters for monuments of all sorts—but Hank wanted more. He wanted to see the world. And he was cocky. He volunteered for the trickiest missions, possible or impossible.

Clearly he had overreached, and this was his punishment.

He nearly bit through the leather, and tears squeezed from his eyes, but he managed to hold still while Lisette used tweezers to pull splinters and ripped fabric from the wound. It was a kind of pain he’d never experienced before. It felt as if the top of his head was coming off. He tried to go away somewhere, to travel deep in his mind to another place. Back home. Moonlight Quarry, where they dug glorious marble from the earth to create pillars for libraries, headstones for the departed, statues to honor heroes.

He had been at war less than a year, and he already knew that the real heroes were not the generals and battle commanders, but the everyday soldiers and common folk who endured the war, day in and day out, often fighting just to stay alive, and burying their dead along the way. When he’d first signed up, he thought it sounded heroic to be a specialized soldier dropped behind enemy lines for reconnaissance work.

Hank had never been much for school, but in special training, he became the scholar his parents never thought he would be. He learned to operate aids to navigation, to read a map and compass in the dark, to sense the wind and weather with the lick of a finger. He knew how to use compass beacons, colored panels, Eureka radar sets, even colored smoke. His stick, which consisted of a dozen pathfinders and the bodyguards tasked with defending them on the ground, had performed successful missions in Sicily and along the coast of Italy. Their job was to land in the DZ in advance of the main body, setting up visual and radio signals for the incoming troopers, finding pickup zones and landing sites, creating a clear field of action for the ground ops to come. Some fellows didn’t think the work was as important as combat runs, but Hank had eagerly volunteered for the advance mission. When it came down to it, he didn’t really want to kill anybody.

He felt lousy about his failed mission. He had no idea where the guys in his stick were, or what they thought happened to him. Even if he could get his communications equipment to work, he couldn’t chance using it.

Maybe he would end up dying right here in this hut. The gangrene would get him, or a patrol would find him and shoot him on sight. Made him wonder why the devil he was letting this girl torture him.

Her ministrations caused a pain so deep that he foamed at the mouth like an animal, the spit bubbling past his clenched teeth and soaking the leather belt. His breath came in shallow gasps, each one causing the broken ribs to stab like daggers. At one point, he saw stars. He knew it was impossible, because he was hiding out in a shelter of stone, but there were explosions in front of his eyes. Even when he closed them tight, he saw the diamond pinpricks, stabbing into his head.

A faint voice penetrated the fog of agony. “I’m sorry,” said a soft whisper. “I’m so sorry. I don’t want to hurt you. I want you to get better.”

He dragged his eyes open and the sparkling stars faded. He blinked and more tears fell, and then she came into focus. Lisette. His blond angel. To his astonishment, she was weeping as she worked, the tears creating silvery tracks down her smooth, creamy cheeks.

She was so damned beautiful. If this was the last thing he saw before he died, he was a lucky son of a gun.

Lisette told no one about the man who had fallen from the sky. She didn’t want to burden anyone with dangerous information. And even more urgently, she didn’t want to bring harm to the stranger. Yet if she didn’t treat his fever and wounds properly, she might be the one to harm him.

On the pretext of taking photographs, she walked out to the countryside each morning and evening. Didier and their “guests” approved of her passion for photography, since they liked having their pictures taken while strutting around in their smart uniforms. To maintain her cover, she pretended to enjoy this aspect of her work, because it meant a steady supply of darkroom materials, and so she cooperated.

She took a different route on her walks so as not to rouse suspicion. Each time she approached the remote borie, she did so with breath held and heart pounding. Had he survived the night? The day? Would he be better or worse?

On the third day at sunrise, she arrived with supplies hidden in the bottom of her straw market basket. She stepped into the stone hut to find his carbine propped on its tripod and aimed at the opening. Having a gun pointed at her was such a strange, vulnerable feeling, yet she wasn’t afraid of him. He was vulnerable, too, and he knew it. She was aware of the cyanide capsule he kept in a small metal tube in the bottom of his shirt pocket. Perhaps he had others hidden elsewhere. It must be terrible for Hank to hold that decision in his hands. The village priest warned that suicide was a mortal sin, but if it kept a man from giving up information to the Nazis that would lead to more death, was it still?

“Are you awake?” she whispered, keeping to one side of the carbine. She didn’t want him to startle awake and shoot before he recognized her.

“Yeah,” he said, the word coming on a wheezy breath.

“Did you sleep?”

“On and off.”

She knew he was embarrassed by the old metal basin he used for a bathroom, and so she simply took it to the creek, emptied and washed it, and returned. She handed him a clean linen towel dampened with fresh water. The sun slanted in through the opening of the hut, and she saw that his face appeared swollen and red.

“You’re still feverish,” she said, trying not to seem alarmed.

He had been trying to repair his communications equipment. She could see the small parts spread on the ground beside him. She had a fleeting thought of Jean-Luc, so clever with radios, but she hadn’t seen him in weeks.

She took out some bread and boiled eggs. At the bottom of the basket were more wound dressings and disinfectant powder. In a small wooden box was a glass tube in a syringe. “This is penicillin,” she said. “It will cure the infection.”

“Where the devil did you get that?” he asked, blinking at it. “Christ on a crutch, did you tell somebody?”

“Of course not. I have a friend who was a . . . vétérinaire. You understand?”

“Veterinarian.”

Lisette hadn’t said anything to Dr. Toselli about the soldier, but had simply, in the course of conversation, asked him “hypothetical” questions about how he might treat a certain type of wound. And Toselli—bless him—did not wonder why she was asking. He had told her that, given the gravity of the wounds she described and the persistence of the fever, a shot of penicillin was in order. He had even shown her how to administer the shot subcutaneously, having her practice on an unripe pear from his garden.