Into the Darkest Day: An emotional and totally gripping WW2 historical novel

by Kate Hewitt

  Abby felt terrible now, wretched with misery at hurting her friend, and all because she’d been hurting. “Shannon, I’m sorry—”

  “And as for the dating, or lack thereof? The truth was, I thought Mike would follow me. We’d been dating for three years. I was hoping he’d propose, we’d settle in Ashford, have a couple of kids, the minivan, the picket fence. Moving back here was my passive-aggressive way of giving him an ultimatum, and he didn’t bite. When I lost my job, I lost him, too.” Shannon looked down at her wineglass while Abby stared at her, appalled.

  “Shannon. Why didn’t you tell me any of this before?”

  “Because, in my pride, I thought I was the friend who had it all together. And I didn’t want you feeling sorry for me. But I’m telling you now, because… well, because I want to be honest. And I want you to be honest.”

  So that was how it worked. Abby swallowed, knowing that no matter what her friend had shared, she wasn’t ready to have a similar bloodletting, but Shannon was clearly waiting for one.

  “You’re right,” she finally said at last. “My relationship with my dad is complicated. He can be difficult, but that’s because he’s sad.”

  “But you’re not responsible—”

  “For his happiness. No.” Abby nodded. No, she wasn’t responsible for her father’s happiness, but she had been for his sorrow. His grief. And no matter how much she talked it out—she’d had a couple years of therapy in her mid-twenties—or rationalized it in her own head, no matter how much she understood intellectually that it was a trucker asleep at the wheel who was at fault for her mother and brother’s death and not her, her heart and her gut told her otherwise—every single day. Every single moment. And she knew her father felt the same way.

  But she’d never admitted to Shannon how or why she was to blame, and she couldn’t bear to now. She knew—at least she hoped—that Shannon wouldn’t judge her; if anything, her friend would feel pity. So much pity. But Abby didn’t think she could stand that, either. She’d had enough of it already. And so she stayed silent, because that was what she always did, and she wasn’t ready, or able, to change now.

  “So do you think Simon is justified in doing this research?” she asked, and Shannon sighed, leaning back against the sofa, accepting, thank goodness, that Abby wasn’t going to share anymore. “Because it concerns his family too?”

  “Maybe he could have been more respectful, but it’s not as if it really matters, does it? It happened so long ago. Even if your grandfather did something truly shocking, which I doubt he did…”

  “It matters to my dad.”

  “But that’s your dad, Abby,” Shannon said gently. “Not you. If you take your father out of the equation for a moment, does it matter to you?”

  Abby simply stared at her. She’d never taken her father out of the equation, not once in fifteen years.

  “Are you curious about this Matthew whoever and why your grandfather might have ended up with his medal? And, more importantly, do you want this thing that happened in the past, whatever it is, to come between you and Simon, or draw you closer together?”

  “I’m not sure there is a ‘me and Simon’, not really.”

  “There still could be.”

  “He lives in England—”

  “That’s a whole separate issue.”

  Abby let out a heavy sigh. “I don’t know what I want,” she admitted. “I’m curious, it’s true, and I… I like Simon.” That felt like a confession, a big one, for her. “But my dad.” Three little words that meant so much, that had guided so much of her life. But my dad. She thought of the look of anger on her father’s face and then, far worse, the look of weary resignation. “This matters to him. A lot. I don’t know why, and I think he even knows it shouldn’t, but it still does.”

  “It’s not like Simon is running to the papers—”

  “He’s thinking of writing a book.”

  “But he hasn’t written it yet. And maybe it would actually be better for your father—and for you—to find out whatever this thing is. Secrets are usually not good or healthy, especially in a family.”

  And I’m so very tired of secrets. The realization, as obvious as it surely was, felt strangely groundbreaking. Revelatory in a way that had her sitting back and shaking her head slowly. She didn’t want any more secrets. She didn’t want to keep them; she didn’t want to stay silent about yet another thing in her life, or someone’s else life. And she didn’t want to throw away the promise of something—someone—good in her life, no matter how fleeting or uncertain that relationship might be, for yet another secret, and one that wasn’t even hers.

  “You’re right,” Abby said at last, smiling a little tiredly. “Thank you for saying so. And thank you for putting up with all my crap. I’m sorry I’m not a better friend.”

  “You’re the best friend.” Shannon smiled and reached for the bottle to top up their glasses. “Now, I think it is finally time to put on Gilmore Girls.”

  Two hours later, Abby was walking the mile and a half home through a sultry summer darkness, the country road back to Willow Tree lit only by the stars and a full, silver disc of a moon. Silvery light gilded the fields as she walked, the air balmy and still.

  She felt a tangled mix of sadness and hope; even though she hadn’t told Shannon much, the whole conversation had rocked a door in her heart right off its hinges. Whether she chose to nail it shut once more or pry it open even more remained to be seen.

  Back at Willow Tree, the house was cloaked in quiet, the only light coming from the one on the top of the stove. Her father always left it on when she was out at night, just as her mother had. Traditions carried on, a little reminder of the love and care she knew both her parents had felt for her—and still did.

  Her father still loved her. Abby didn’t doubt that. She never had, except for in her very darkest moments, right after the accident, when they’d both been frozen in shocked grief and terrible silence.

  With a shuddery sigh, Abby flicked off the stove light, so only moonlight lit her way upstairs, the steps creaking under her soft footsteps. She passed her father’s bedroom, and then the guest one, and was about to turn into her own when the fourth bedroom’s door, as firmly shut as always, caught her eye.

  Abby hesitated, and then, feeling a little bit as if she were existing outside herself, observing her actions, she walked to the door and quietly turned the knob. It swung open easily, surprising her. Surely after all these years it should be stuck, squeak in protest?

  But when she stepped inside her brother’s room, she knew immediately that her father had been in there. All the surfaces were free of dust, everything neat and tidy, far tidier than Luke had ever kept it. The room didn’t smell stale, a tragic time capsule. It smelled like lemon polish.

  Her father must have come in here on his own, maybe many times, to have a private moment of grief he’d never even told her about. The thought brought a strange comfort, as well as an intense sadness. They weren’t able to share even this.

  Abby ran her hand along the top of the dresser, smiling faintly at the sight of Luke’s soccer trophies lined up there. He’d loved soccer and piano equally, although he was much better at the latter. All the trophies were for most improved or just participating, but Luke had been proud of them all.

  Luke. A shaft of grief, as fresh as ever, pierced her so deeply she nearly doubled over. Did it ever get easier? Did it ever stop taking you by surprise, leaving you winded and reeling? Even now, fifteen years later, she felt as if Luke could bound into the room with his lopsided smile and his messy hair and ask her if she wanted to play Monopoly. She could hear her mother’s laughing voice floating up the stairs, full of warmth.

  Okay, but if there are arguments I’m throwing it out!

  Another sigh escaped her, this one sounding alarmingly close to a sob. She hadn’t cried in ages, hadn’t let herself. It had been years, perhaps, since she’d let herself weep, although she’d certainly shed enough tears in the
weeks after her mother’s and brother’s deaths; she’d felt like a dried-out husk, hollowed out and empty inside, with nothing more to give, and yet somehow she and her father had had to go on and on and on.

  As she stood there in her brother’s darkened bedroom, Abby knew she wasn’t ready to cry now, just as she knew if she did weep, it would not just be for her brother and mother, but for the relationship with her father that had been so less than it could have been. She could feel the emotion building inside her like water rising, a storm about to break, and she willed it back. One day maybe, if she was strong—or was it weak?—enough, but not now.

  Right now, she wanted to feel hope. Frail, fledgling thing that it might be, tattered and desperate, barely there, poking up from the barren soil. She still wanted to feel it. She could almost grasp it with her fingertips, could see it just out of reach, and she longed for more.

  She wanted to move on past the sorrowful stasis her life had become, without her even fully realizing it. Months and years had passed when she’d told herself she was happy, or at least happy enough, not even questioning the lie. Yet now she recognized it for what it was, and she wanted something else. But was that Simon? Did he fit into the reconfigured picture of her life at all, or was he just a passing fancy, someone she might recall one day with a faint smile, a wondering “what if”? Abby had no idea, or whether she’d ever be able to find out.

  The next morning, her father was drinking coffee by the kitchen sink when Abby came into the room. He looked up, his hooded gaze lifting and dropping again in the matter of a second as he nodded his usual greeting. He was already dressed for a day spent in the orchard and barn, his gnarled fingers wrapped around a mug of coffee, an empty cereal bowl in the sink.

  “Dad.” Abby took a deep breath, let it buoy her faltering courage. “I went into Luke’s room last night.”

  Her father didn’t move, hadn’t been moving in the first place, but somehow it seemed as if he went even stiller.

  “I saw how clean it was, everything dusted,” Abby continued, trying to pitch her voice both gentle and determined. She had a feeling she’d failed; it was wobbling all over the place. “It looked nice. Have—have you been going in there?”

  Her father didn’t answer and Abby made herself continue.

  “It’s only… I didn’t know. The door was always closed, but I would have… I would have gone in too.” She trailed off, realizing she didn’t actually know where she was going with this. She just wanted her father to say something, anything, to bridge the yawning space that had been there since the accident, even if Abby had acted like it hadn’t been. Even if she had done her best to step over it as if it didn’t matter, as if it wasn’t the huge gulf she knew it had been all along.

  “Not that often,” he said, his voice giving nothing away. “Just once in a while.”

  Abby nodded slowly, at a loss for her words. “I wish I’d known,” she finally said, and too late she realized she sounded reproachful.

  Her father finished his coffee and put the cup in the sink.

  “I’ll be out in the barn,” he said, and then he was gone, striding out the back door, the screen door slapping against the wood frame like a rebuke.

  Was it ever going to change? Was he? Was she?

  Abby stood in the center of the empty kitchen, her mind drifting despondently over old conversations, so many tired moments like this one.

  She didn’t know how long she stood there, staring into space, the sun slanting across the floor even as her mind felt as if it were in a fog. Her phone buzzed and she took it out of her pocket, saw, with a flicker of trepidation, that it was Simon.

  “Hey.” His voice was warm yet hesitant. “I hope you don’t mind me ringing.”

  “No, I don’t mind.”

  “I should have called before, I know. I wanted to. I just didn’t know what to say.”

  Abby closed her eyes. “I didn’t, either,” she said. “I still don’t.”

  “Are you angry with me?” Simon sounded as if the question cost him; here, perhaps, was the man who had been considered emotionally unavailable. When it wasn’t all easy chat and light flirting, musings about the distant past rather than the painful present, conversation was hard. For both of them.

  “I don’t know,” Abby admitted. “I feel like I don’t know anything anymore.”

  “That’s better than a ‘hell yes’, I suppose,” Simon said with an uncertain laugh.

  “Yes, I guess it is.”

  They were both quiet, the only sound their breathing, a give and take, a silent exchange. It felt like a weirdly intimate moment, and yet Abby didn’t understand it at all. What did Simon want? What did she want? She had no idea why he’d called.

  “Look, I know what you said the other day and I respect it,” he finally said. “I’m not going to write a book or dig up your family secrets and wave them about for all and sundry to see. I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to hurt you, Abby. I hope you believe me about that.”

  “But?” she said after a moment, because there so obviously was one.

  “But I’ve found some things out, and I think you deserve to know what they are. At least, you deserve the right to decide if you want to know.” He paused while Abby tried to think of something to say. “Whatever your choice, Abby, I will respect it.”

  “Will you?” She gazed out the window at the backyard, its colors seeming muted under a humid, gray sky that pressed down on the earth.

  “Yes, I will.”

  Simon was silent, waiting for her verdict, and Abby wondered what he wanted her to say. She felt so tired—tired of it all. Tired of her father’s silence, of tiptoeing across the painful cracks of their relationship, of trying to be happy when something in her wanted to weep and weep and yet never could. She hadn’t even realized just how tired she’d been, until Simon.

  Until Simon.

  Maybe he was little more than a stranger, yet he was already important, if just for that—except, of course, it wasn’t just for that. She’d been backing away from life for the last fifteen years. Maybe now it was finally time to stop.

  “All right,” she said, her voice heavy with the weight of her words. “Tell me what you’ve found out.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Normandy, France

  June 1944

  “He’s ready for you, Lawson.”

  Matthew flicked his cigarette onto the road and ground it beneath his boot, the acrid smell of the tobacco still stinging his nostrils. He hadn’t smoked a single cigarette in his life until two days ago, when he and Tom had finally joined up with a raggedy section of the 508th, everyone milling about the battered buildings of an abandoned village, soldiers seeming both dazed and impatient. The assault had started, and yet there was nothing to do.

  The jump, Matthew had discovered, had gone rather disastrously wrong. Most of the men had been dropped miles from the right place, and many of them were still stumbling around alone in the fields and forests of France, if they hadn’t been killed or captured. Meanwhile, the sea assault had gone ahead, with massive casualties but tattered success, and yet now that they were actually in France, it felt like the next step hadn’t been planned.

  Matthew knew the 508th’s main objective had been to capture Sainte-Mère-Église, secure crossings of the Merderet River, and establish a defensive line north of Neuville-au-Plain. Whether any of that would happen now was in serious question. He suspected the main objective of all the regiments was simply to assemble together and figure out what the hell they were doing.

  But none of that concerned him now; although there had been several exchanges of fire, Matthew hadn’t been involved in any of them. He was deemed too valuable to be lost to a stray bullet or hidden landmine. He was one of the few people in the Allied army who knew German, and who could get military intelligence from one of the hundreds of captured soldiers now in their charge.

  Straightening his shoulders and narrowing his eyes against the glare of the midda
y sun, he walked towards the empty bar where the soldier he was to interrogate had been brought. No one knew anything about him except he was of low rank, the equivalent of a private, and he seemed terrified.

  Unconsciously, Matthew clenched and unclenched his fists as he stood before the wooden door leading into the pub. This would be his first real interrogation, so different from the many practice ones he’d done back at Camp Ritchie, when the “prisoner” had been his instructor or a fellow student, simply pretending to be a German soldier, acting either surly or scared. Even though Matthew had taken it all with the utmost seriousness, he knew now it had never truly felt real.

  Not like this, when a latent fury was coursing through him, and he willed it into something colder and more solid. There was no room for emotion here. He’d been told that many times over the course of his training, and he knew it now.

  He opened the door and stepped inside.

  The bar was dim, a few tables scattered around, most of the chairs broken, everything covered with dust. Whoever had been patron of this place had left long ago.

  Matthew blinked to adjust himself to the gloom and then saw the man sitting at a table in the center of the dusty room. He stared at Matthew uncertainly, his eyes wide. Matthew regarded him back coolly.

  The man was young, no more than a kid, maybe nineteen or twenty. Blue eyes blinked at him rapidly and his blond hair was cut short.

  Matthew reached into his jacket pocket.

  “Zigarette?” he asked casually, proffering the pack, and the man blinked at him.

  “D-d-danke… ja,” he stammered, and took one of the cigarettes from the pack. He put it between his lips as Matthew leaned forward with his lighter. “Danke,” he murmured again, and drew deeply on the cigarette. Matthew remained silent and the boy eyed him with obvious curiosity. “Are you German?” he asked, speaking his native tongue.