He was loved into a life that was not his. The truth took the long way home.

Henry Aldrich shipped out in 1944, a history professor and no soldier, with a life in New York already arranged for him - a woman promised to him years before, and a future settled in rooms he had never seen.

The Army sent him to England instead of the war, to a planning office outside London and a farming village on the Thames. A young woman working her father's land. A father who took a man's measure quickly. By spring the arranged life had come apart and Henry had chosen one for himself, and he had made a promise he meant to keep.

Then his orders came.

What the war did to Henry Aldrich took an afternoon. What the people who loved him did about it afterward took sixteen years to come to light, and by then it had cost more than any of them meant to spend.