Maybe this time there would be a letter from André. I thought again of the last thing he had said to me. It won’t be long, and I’ll be home. Then we can live in Paris. I promise.I filled my mind with that vision, that he would come home from the war and I would be delirious with happiness. We would make joyous love, and I would conceive a child. We would sell this drafty house, and I would give birth in Paris, and our child would learn all the lessons well at école élémentaire, and if she was a girl, she would wear flowered dresses in summer like Mélanie’s Mimi, and if he was a boy, he would wear short gray pants and show his dimpled knees. As André rowed in the upper lake of the Bois de Boulogne, our perfect child would trail a delicate hand in the water, and all that would be lovely, but we would never be quite as we had been because André hadn’t trusted me.THEN, THE HAPPY SIGHT: Odette’s daughter, Sandrine, the post office clerk, balancing a letter on her palm. “Voilà!
