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As if he hadn’t heard her, Durham went on. “I know about girls like you. Use men for what you want. Dump them when you’ve gotten it.”

She couldn’t deny the truth of this. She had used Louis—would have used any man in that moment—to learn how to fly.

But it wasn’t as if she hadn’t cared for him.

He was kind. He was fun. He’d been a good teacher in the air and in bed.

And they’d been careful—she hadn’t gotten in trouble, hadn’t tied him down.

He was probably relieved to find her gone.

Angry about the cashbox and his lighter, perhaps, but she doubted she’d left him lonesome and pining.

But here was Durham, seemingly angry at her departure, angry at how she’d hurt his friend.

Had she been wrong all along? Had Louis cared more for her than she realized? Had she hurt a good man?

A good man who was somewhere overseas now. Flying bombers or fighters. Flying the same planes she’d flown, but flying them in a hail of ack-ack, dodging enemy planes. Did he think of her still? As the girl who’d left him cold?

“What’s he flying these days?” she asked.

You couldn’t ask where they were stationed, not exactly, but sometimes you could guess by what they were flying.

An F4F Wildcat would mean he was Navy. Launching off aircraft carriers.

Threatened by Zeros. A P-51 Mustang might mean long legs to the Ruhr and back to Britain, hoping for cloud cover, hoping to drop payload before the German Luftwaffe caught up with him.

“Nothing.”

That was ridiculous. If she knew anything about Louis, it was that he’d always fly. The only thing that could stop him was ... “Oh,” she whispered.

“Yeah. Oh.”

“I didn’t know,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, well, why would you know? Not like you bothered to keep in touch, right? Not like you needed anything else from him. And now you can play pretend, in your cute little uniform, up in the sky here at home, where it’s nice and safe.”

She could have told Durham about the ack-ack that caught the tail of her plane one night. She could have told him about the list they kept by the barracks phone of men to avoid. But he was right: it didn’t compare, in the end.

“Don’t hog the pretty ones for yourself, champ!” Another pilot—you could always tell: they swaggered even when standing still—reached past Durham to introduce himself to Vivian. What a relief to turn her back on Durham’s scorn.

Taken on its own, her rescuer’s face was farm-boy plain. He could have grown up down the road from Vivian. But his milk-fed confidence and grin made him handsome. He had something of George and Tom’s golden glow about him.

He danced wonderfully. Vivian, never very graceful on the dance floor, felt light and beautiful moving with him.

They talked of planes and the latest newsreels and how well George and Tom suited one another.

The dancing and the talking made them thirsty, so they returned frequently to the bar.

They talked about the beach. He’d love to see it sometime, he said.

Maybe he could fly back in one weekend to see the ocean.

And her. Vivian couldn’t remember feeling so happy.

She drank and she danced and drank some more, and when George and Tom left the Officers’ Club in a flurry of confetti, Vivian leaned against the pilot to stay upright.

She leaned against him as he walked her to the barracks, deserted because the party at the club would continue until nearly dawn.

She leaned against him to make it to her room, thanked him for a lovely evening, and then fell into bed and gratefully passed out.

When she woke, her first fear was not of the man and what he was doing to her.

Her first fear was of someone else finding out and telling Cochran.

Of being sent home. Of no longer being allowed to do her favorite thing in the world.

Then she came to herself a little more. The pilot’s weight pinned her to the bed.

She pushed at him. Tried to roll out from under him.

He punched her in the side of her ribs. The pain was paralyzing.

She should scream. No, if she screamed, they would come. They would see. They would throw her out. She would lose everything. I’ll tell Louis, she thought. Louis won’t stand for this. Then the pilot gave a triumphant grunt, and she remembered that Louis was dead.

Released from his weight, Vivian levered herself up off the mattress.

Her head spun, her throat tasted sour. She barely had time to lean over the side of the bunk before she heaved.

The contents of her stomach spattered over the plank floor.

The pilot, buckling his belt, gagged. He pulled on his boots, grabbed his cap.

Then he was gone.

Two days after the wedding, Tom shipped out. “We knew it was coming,” said George. “That’s why the hurry to get married, though everyone probably thinks it was something else.”

Vivian mustered some sort of reply. She should have been thrilled to have George back, to no longer be Quigley and Elliot’s third wheel.

But she felt better when George wasn’t around.

Then she didn’t have to plunder her brain for the appropriate responses to whatever George said.

She didn’t have to come up with anything of her own to add to the conversation.

The only moments she felt any peace were when she was flying, up away from people, distant from anything that could harm her.

But Quigley didn’t want her in the air. “When was the last time you slept, Shaw? You look wrecked.”

“Thanks,” said Vivian. “That’s just what every girl wants to hear.”

“I’m serious. I can’t let you up in one of these planes if you’re not sleeping. Get yourself checked out by the flight surgeon. If he signs off, then up you go.”

But Vivian had no intention of subjecting herself to any sort of medical exam.

She knew Quigley was right—without sleep, she was unfit to fly, so she tried to sleep.

She tried with earplugs from one of the Ack Ack guys, with an eye mask Helen had sent to George, and with far too much whiskey.

On good nights she achieved a veneer of slumber—a tempting toe-in-the-water-of-sleep illusion of rest. Her eyes were closed.

She was horizontal. At times, even dreaming.

But her mind and body remained alert, vigilant.

She despaired that she’d never be allowed to fly again.

Then Col. Stephenson convened the WASPs for a meeting. “Good news, ladies,” he gloated. “You’re all rotating out of Camp Davis.” Half of them, including Vivian, would go to Liberty Field in Georgia, and the other half, including George, to Otis Field in Massachusetts.

George was distraught. “They can’t separate us!”

“They can do whatever they want,” said Vivian. She didn’t have it in her to pretend to be sad. The truth was, she couldn’t wait to go. To no longer be the shadow dodging George’s relentless sun. To no longer enthuse over the arrival of letters from Tom.

“Vivian, are you okay?”

She was far from okay. But how could she explain the why of it to George?

Where did the why of it even start? With herself, she concluded.

She was a terrible judge of men. First Bobby Broussard, who just wanted sex.

Then Louis, who must have found her lacking or he wouldn’t have run around with all those other girls.

Now this milk-fed pilot, the one she’d thought might be her Tom.

Someone who would take her dancing, talk planes with her.

But instead he’d—no, she refused to relive it.

Each of these men had detected something in her. Probably everyone else did too. Some damage she couldn’t remedy. Her mother must have seen it the day Vivian was born. That she would never be quite right. She would never have—never deserve—what George had.

When she and George hugged goodbye, they both had tears in their eyes. Vivian hoped George couldn’t tell that hers were tears of relief.

She’d ferry planes once she got to Liberty Field, and the USAAF saw no reason why she shouldn’t begin immediately. They shuttled her to Ohio to pick up an A-24.

In the ready room at Wright Field, she smoothed her uniform.

Jacqueline Cochran had recently outfitted them in what they called their Santiago Blues—a real uniform reflecting the real work they did, reflecting the promise that one day soon they’d be official members of the US Armed Forces.

She found a metal folding chair, leaned her head against the wall, and closed her eyes.

She’d be flying solo for the first time in weeks, with no Quigley to prevent her. She ought to get some rest first.

Probably the pilots who entered the ready room thought she was asleep. And once they started talking, whispering loudly to one another, she was afraid to open her eyes and catch them out.

“What do we have here?” asked the first.

“Looks like some victory girl got lost,” said the second.

“Nah, that’s that new WASP uniform. She must be a pilot.”

“WASP, victory girl, doesn’t matter. Once they take off the uniform.”

“Not exactly heavy lifting, getting them out of their uniforms.”

“Yeah, you hear about those WAACs they sent home from Africa?”

“Hey now, they were just serving their country. By servicing their countrymen.” The joke reduced them to spasms of laughter.

“Looks like some of our countrymen wore this one out.” Vivian, panicking, heard his boots approaching.

“Wouldn’t touch her if I were you. Those girls are crawling with VD.”

The boots retreated. The voices faded as the pilots walked away. “Such a shame,” she heard. “I mean, they can’t go back home afterward—not where I come from anyway.” As they moved off, she caught the word “unwanted.” She caught “no sister of mine.”