Page 46 of The Moonlight Healers

Helene straightened out the bandage. “Charming, maybe. Sincere, no.”

“I feel okay,” Thomas said, his voice less practiced. “Thanks.”

“I thought maybe you’d be gone, when I got back today.” She considered her next words. He had been so honest with her, about his home, his family. She wanted to be honest with him too. “I’mgladyou’re still here.”

“Better than the alternative, isn’t it?”

Helene shook her head. “That was a stupid thing to say.”

“No,” Thomas said. He looked down at his knee as Helene began to roll the bandage in slow circles. “It was a kind thing to say.”

They lapsed into a comfortable silence as Helene worked. The skin around his knee was warm, almost hot. “Are you sure you’re feeling okay?”

Thomas sighed. “The doctor looked at it earlier. The skin is a little red around the wound, but he put some sulfa powder on it. Said it should be better by the morning.”

Helene felt a prickle of worry. She knew from shadowing her mother how quickly minor wounds could progress to sepsis. In her mind, she could see the pages of her mother’s book that dealt with infection. If she were at home and had access to the ingredients, she could use dried oregano and sage to make a poultice, or brew chamomile tea. She tried to reassure herself that Thomas had been seen by a doctor, that modern medicine was just as effective as her mother’s remedies, but she didn’t like how pale he looked. “I should check your temperature.”

Thomas waved his hand. “It’s really nothing, no need to worry. Can I ask you something, though?”

Helene frowned.

“I’m fine, Helene, really. But I would like some distraction.”

“Okay, but if—”

“I promise I’ll ask the doctor about it, when he comes in.”

“Fine, ask me your question.”

“What do you want to do after all of this? If you could do anything?”

She fought to keep the skepticism from her expression, but all she could think of was her grandfather, likely in prison somewhere, of her shuttered hometown. “How do you know there’ll be an after?”

“You don’t really talk like that, do you?” he said kindly.

Helene wanted to be like Thomas, believe in a better future,but when she searched inside of herself, all she found was vacant space. “I didn’t used to.”

“What changed?”

“Everything.”

Thomas shifted in the bed. “Has it been terrible here, since the war started?”

“Some of it. When it was new, especially.” She began to wrap the bandage around his leg. “I remember my grandfather crying at the kitchen table the morning the Germans came to our town. I was fifteen and when I saw that, I knew with certainty that the world was ending.” The thought of that same table empty, of her house without her grandfather in it, gripped Helene with such force that all the air left her lungs.

“And the rest of it?” Thomas asked.

Helene reminded herself to breathe, to concentrate on Thomas’s dressing change, the correct way to weave the bandage so it would be secure but not too tight. “So much is the same,” she said. “People go to work. And school. And if it’s warm and sunny and the trees are in bloom, for a second, it can almost feel like before, like you don’t even realize you’re holding your breath.”

“You’ll have that back, Helene. Your before.”

Helene nodded even though she didn’t believe him. Whatever hope she held that there would be an end to the war had broken on the rocky beaches of Dieppe. And it had only been further fragmented when she learned her grandfather was missing. Even if a miracle happened and the Allies won, even if the occupation ended, nothing would ever be the same again.

Thomas held her gaze. “But what if you pretend for a moment. That you’ll be able to do anything. Or go anywhere. Would you go back home, work with your mother?”

Helene grabbed the pin to secure his bandage. It had been years since she’d allowed herself to think of a future beyond Honfleur. When she was a little girl, she’d listen to her father’s stories about places that existed across oceans, cities and desertsand mountains he described with such clarity she was sure he had seen them all, and she had wondered if she would ever see them for herself. But her world had slammed shut the day they buried him. She could never abandon her mother.

“Of course. My life is in Honfleur.”

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