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Outside the midtown bus station, George pressed a wad of bills into Vivian’s hand.

“Write to me in Enid,” she said. “I’ll be there in a month.

” Then she raced the pram away. When George disappeared around the corner, Vivian’s stomach dropped as if she’d just hit an air pocket.

She’d been so desperate to go, she hadn’t once considered how glad George would be to get rid of her.

Vivian had been useless, after all. The babies, sensing her lack of maternal instinct, fussed whenever she held them.

Vivian swore, when she peered into the crib, that they looked past her, always seeking George.

The person they could trust to take care of them.

After so many months of close living with other women, followed by weeks of close living with George and then the babies, she was on her own.

She felt small, standing on the gritty sidewalk as people bustled past her.

She felt better once she boarded the bus, but her shoulders didn’t fully relax until it lurched out of the station.

George’s cash meant Vivian could afford a taxi from the Haverford bus station to Marian Fontana’s house.

“Nice neighborhood,” said the cabbie as he lifted her battered suitcase from the trunk.

An emerald lawn stretched from the gray stone house to the street.

A slate walkway, flanked by shrubs trimmed into perfect spheres, curved toward the wide stone steps of the house.

The front door swung open, and Marian dashed out.

“Shaw! You made it!”

“I did!” She wished she’d worn her WASP uniform. The shabbiness of her civilian clothing looked all too apparent against the Fontanas’ pristine lawn, next to Marian’s sleek pencil skirt. Vivian shifted her cardboard suitcase behind her, but there was no hiding it.

“Jim!” called Fontana. “Vivian’s here! Come help!”

“Oh, I don’t need—”

Before she could finish, a man who had to be Marian’s brother—same glint in his chestnut eyes, same cleft in his perfect jaw—bounded down the steps and took the suitcase from her hand. “The famous Vivian Shaw,” he said. “Jim Fontana. A pleasure.”

The Fontana parents were spending the winter in Florida. “Isn’t that your neck of the woods, Vivvy?” Marian asked during dinner.

“Not quite,” said Vivian, unable to imagine the people who owned this enormous house, who ate off such delicate china, anywhere near her neck of the woods.

“It’s been just Jim and me since Christmas,” said Marian. “And honestly, we’re getting tired of each other, so I’m glad you wrote.”

“Do you still fly?” asked Jim.

Vivian had been so consumed by getting out of New York, with solving the problem of the baby, that she hadn’t thought of flying in weeks.

“Sorry about the WASP,” said Fontana, in a tone that suggested she wasn’t sorry at all.

“Forgive my sister,” said Jim, glaring at Marian, who drained her wineglass in response. “She hasn’t flown since she left Sweetwater. And forgive my question. That was insensitive of me. I only meant that, if you’re interested, I could take you out to the airfield tomorrow.”

“We still have the Fairchild,” said Marian. Seeing Vivian’s confused expression, she continued, “I don’t fly anymore, but Jim was a bomber captain. He still likes to go up.”

Jim’s eyes went dead, as if he were trying not to see something. He blinked, topped off everyone’s wine, and said, “We’ll go first thing tomorrow.”

“By which he means after lunch,” Marian clarified.

“Well, we wouldn’t want to miss the Scofields’ party tonight, would we?” Jim said.

Marian lent Vivian a dress. “It’s a tad short, but they’ll all be looking at your gorgeous face, not your hemline.

We’ll have the housekeeper let it out tomorrow.

” They piled into Jim’s Zephyr convertible and roared off to the Scofields’, then roared back in the early hours of the morning.

Vivian fell into bed and slept harder than she had in months.

After a late lunch, Jim drove her out to the airfield. “Let’s see what you can do,” he said, offering her the controls. Soaring high over the Delaware Valley, she felt like her old self again. “Nice!” said Jim as she banked into a chandelle. She did a few lazy eights for fun.

Jim applauded. “Those idiot generals don’t know what they’re missing.”

When they returned to the house, Marian had laid out three dresses on the guest bed. “Marian, I couldn’t.”

“They’re last year’s,” said Marian. “And Lottie already let them out. They’re yours.”

Vivian’s days fell into a pattern: sleeping until noon, eating a decadent lunch, flying with Jim, rolling her hair and dressing for a more decadent dinner.

Then driving off to this party or that, dancing and drinking the night away with Marian and Jim and their Main Line friends.

One early morning, as Marian wove her way up the front steps, Jim took Vivian’s hand, pulled her to him, kissed her.

Her stomach dropped, then quickly righted.

She wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him back.

Waking long after daylight, she found herself in a boy’s room.

Model planes hung from the ceiling on fishing line.

Posters of racing coupes covered the walls.

A baseball mitt perched on the dresser alongside a bottle of cologne.

Jim’s clothes from the night before mingled with her own on the floor.

She stretched until her leg met his and stirred him to life.

The next month felt magical. She ate the Fontanas’ plentiful food, flew through the streets in the Zephyr, flew through the air in the Fairchild, flew through the night in Jim’s arms. She studied the clothing that Marian and her friends wore.

While shopping with Marian, she counted out George’s cash and bought herself a few good pieces.

George was in Enid now. She ought to write to her.

To Elizabeth. To Aunt Clelia. But there was always another party, another flight, another kiss from Jim.

Another chance to make love to him and erase that horrible night at Camp Davis.

“I’ll be brought into the family business,” said Jim when Vivian asked him if he had any career plans.

“Mostly investing,” he said when she asked him what the family business involved.

He didn’t seem to be in any hurry to start work.

It was clear he didn’t have to be. Vivian suspected George’s Ector money paled in comparison to the Fontana fortune.

She found herself thinking of George often, wondering how she was managing.

She tried hard not to think about what George was managing.

Another month gone, and the novelty of Marian and Jim’s life wore thin.

The ease and impracticality of it wore her out.

On rainy afternoons, she sat in the guest room window seat, flicking her lighter open and closed, telling herself to start making plans.

Her welcome was bound to wear out. Better to leave before things turned.

She wrote to George, telling her about the Fontana house, about Jim and the parties and the flying.

George wrote back asking for details about the plane, the airfield, the view from ten thousand feet up.

Vivian wished she could tell George in person.

Writing it all out in a letter took so long that she was late to dinner.

She hurried down the grand staircase. The double doors to the dining room stood open—Jim and Marian were waiting for her.

She heard the soft release of a cork from a wine bottle, the slip of liquid into crystal.

She heard Jim say, “I’m going to ask Mother for Grandmother’s ring. ”

“They’ll never go for that,” said Marian. “Look, I love Vivian, but who are her people?”

“I don’t care who her people are.”

“Neither do I. But Mother will. Don’t look at me like that. You know I’m right.”

Vivian trod heavily across the foyer. “There she is.” Jim stood and filled her glass with wine.

She took her seat at his elbow, across from Marian.

Beneath the table, he put a hand on her thigh.

“Finish your correspondence?” he asked. She hadn’t once seen him pick up a pen, or a tool of any kind.

He was a boy playing house, sitting in his father’s chair. A tempting boy, but a boy all the same.

When she told him she was going, Jim lowered himself to one knee. “I was going to wait for a ring, but—”

Vivian took his hands and raised him from the ground. “No,” she said. He dropped her hands. “I’m not the marrying kind, Jim.”

“Every girl is the marrying kind. You just mean you don’t want to marry me.”

“Believe me,” she said. “This is for the best.” He sulked away to his room, refused to see her off.

“Marian, thank you. I’m going to miss you.”

“I wish you wouldn’t go,” said Marian as Vivian’s cab pulled up. But Vivian suspected they’d soon find a new toy to amuse themselves with.

Thanks to Marian, she knew what to wear. Thanks to Jim, she knew she could still fly, in the air and in bed. She traveled west, hopping from airfield to airfield.

Vivian entered the offices at these airfields with the attitude of a penitent.

A worshipper come to pay her respects. She struck up conversations with the bishops of these cathedral-hangars.

Over the course of the conversation, she let fall the names of certain aircraft, careful not to mention the most powerful ones, the ones the men in these churches were least likely to have flown themselves.

She offered them the small and the middling.

She complained knowledgably about sticky rudders and balky engines.

She returned, day after day, until she either wore them down or they took pity and let her repair an engine, file their disorganized paperwork, or attempt to balance their books, in exchange for some—never enough—flight time.

Sometimes they paid her. Sometimes they let her sleep on the couch in the office.

Sometimes she let one of them take her home.

When she had spare change, she called George. George could never talk for long—a pot was boiling over. A child was fussing. But she always asked the same question: What are you flying? Even though the planes weren’t much, George sighed with envy when Vivian answered.

“I’m living pretty rough these days, George,” she said, offering that up as compensation.

“Oh yes?” The wistfulness in her friend’s voice nearly broke Vivian’s heart. Even so, she kept the exact degree of roughness a secret.

She was horrible at bookkeeping. They always let her go. So very sorry. Just no longer have a need. See how things are. Hand-to-mouth as it is around here.

At an airfield in Michigan, every plane she saw was in excellent repair.

The office looked as tidy as a ship—not a stray scrap of paper to be seen.

“I could do your typing,” she ventured, knowing that her typing would be a disaster.

The man behind the desk—his bearing suggested he’d spent his war years as an officer—arched his brows. “Or your books,” she said.

“You do books?” the man asked. Vivian gave a shrug that could have been read either way, and he laughed.

“Come to dinner with me, and we’ll figure something out.

” The offer had been made at other airfields by other men sitting behind desks or stooped over engine components.

Occasionally—depending on the man, depending on the planes—Vivian accepted, knowing full well what they expected in return. But usually, she moved on.

“All right,” she said.

She went to dinner with him. She went to bed with him. What she thought of as the incident hadn’t put her off men. She refused to let it. She refused to let it take anything else from her—especially not sex.

The man had purchased the airfield with money his father had left him. It was a dream come true, he told her. A very expensive dream. In his waking life, he worked as an accountant. “It pays the bills,” he said.

“So you don’t need a bookkeeper,” said Vivian.

“You’re no bookkeeper.”

“But I could be,” she said.

He taught her single and double entry. He let her fly his Beechcraft. He took her to more restaurants. He took her to more hotels. And then his wife found out.

Vivian moved on, but with a marketable skill. No one wanted female pilots, but they liked a female bookkeeper. Especially one as ornamental as Vivian.

“Bookkeeping?” said her sister when Vivian called home. “You could do that right here in Hahira.”

“You know I couldn’t. Not really.”

Elizabeth sighed. “You could at least call Mother. She’d sure appreciate it.”

Vivian, dutiful, called her mother, who was so glad to hear her voice, who sure appreciated her calling, who couldn’t talk now. A storm was blowing in and the roses needed to be tied to the trellis.

But Vivian knew it wasn’t the roses, or even her mother’s general lack of interest, that made her hurry the receiver back into its cradle.

And it wasn’t exasperation that kept Elizabeth from arguing with her about coming home.

It was that they sensed that she’d done a terrible thing.

But because they loved her (even her mother, in a distant sort of way), they were careful not to give her the slightest opportunity to reveal her secret.