“When you left for war. Was there someone you left behind?” Stella put down her half-eaten slice. “The author, well, he didn’t include anything like that in the book, so I wondered...” It would have been so easy to fall in love with a man like Jack. She’d be surprised if other women hadn’t felt the same way.
He took a drink before answering. “There’s always more than what appears in the printed book. More to the stories capturedwithin the pages. I didn’t have a girlfriend when I left. A few weeks before, yes. Ellen.” He said her name like it still unsettled something inside him, and he didn’t elaborate.
Stella’s curiosity flared. “What happened?”
He glanced down at the floor. “You can’t just leave it there?”
Stella made a scoffing noise. “Could you?”
He smiled at her. “I actually thought Ellen and I would get married. It made sense,” he said. “We dated for two years, and she was a good girl. Capable and kind. I figured we’d settle down and have two or three kids. She liked flowers, so I wanted land outside the city to give her a garden. Then the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940 went into practice. Four years later, my district was selected, and given that I was classified as a 1-A, I was called into action.”
“Two years was a long courtship for that time, wasn’t it? Didn’t girls get married when they were barely adults?”
Jack studied the pizza box. “When we met, she was seventeen. Her parents weren’t in a rush to marry her off. When we found out I was going to join the war, she said she cared a lot about me, but she didn’t have ‘that feeling.’”
“What feeling?”
He met Stella’s gaze. “That feeling that she wanted to wait for me to come back. So she broke it off.”
Stella gaped at him. “Shebroke up withyou? After two years?”
He chuckled. “You say that like it’s an impossible idea.”
Stella wanted to say,Have you seen you? You’re gorgeous and thoughtful and well-mannered, and did I mention gorgeous? How could anyone spend two years with Jack Mathis and decide he wasn’t worth waiting for?
They sat quietly for a few minutes while Stella created images of Ellen and Jack together—in her mind they were dancing on a polished floor while Jack spun her around and Ellen laughed. Thenthey were sitting on a picnic blanket in the park, eating grapes and cheese on crackers. Then they were strolling beneath the moonlight—
Jack interrupted her thoughts. “I wanted to get married.”
“I’m sorry Ellen broke it off,” Stella said. “It seems kinda heartless to do that to a man going off to war.”
Jack lifted one shoulder. “Better before I left than after I got back.”
But Jack had never returned from the war.
“I wouldn’t have wanted to come home, thinking I’d finally be able to get my life back on track, only to have my girl ditch me,” he said. “IfI’d come home.”
“If you had, do you think you would have eventually gotten married?”
A small smile lifted his lips. “I’d like to think so. I wanted a family. A home. All that jazz.”
Stella stared at him. “I wish you could have had it all.”
Jack’s gaze lingered on her. “You said you aren’t in love with Wade anymore, but were you?”
Stella reached for her slice of pizza and stopped. A door opened in her mind. She pictured Wade leaning against the doorjamb with his boyish smile, arms crossed over his chest, asking her if she was coming in to join him or not. A small part of her ached to go back to those days with him when he’d made her feel special, but the much larger part of her was so not interested in his half-hearted romance. “I thought I was.”
Jack propped an elbow on the desk and watched her. “Tell me about him, about the two of you together.”
Stella pinched the bridge of her nose. “I can’t possibly prepare you for the ugliness.”
“I’ve seen some pretty bad stuff, Stella.”
Passages fromBeyond the Southern Horizonflashed through hermind—his two closest comrades killed by a mortar shell explosion a few yards from where he stood loading the gun on a tank, raging blizzards and freezing rain, and wounded soldiers freezing to death while Jack slept in a foxhole wrapped in a coat he took off a deceased German soldier.
He’d definitely seen worse than her busted-up relationship saga. “Wade was one of Percy’s friends. He was older by a few years, but we’d known each other almost our whole lives. When we had Dad’s funeral, Wade was there, and we reconnected. We chatted off and on for a couple years before anything started happening. He was married— Well, he was separated and had been for more than a year. But he wasn’t officially divorced.”
Jack sat up straighter in his chair. “You dated a married man?”
