31st August 1939-On The Way To Warsaw
The Day Before The World Changed Forever…
The bus had been running since before dawn.
It smelled of cigarette smoke and damp wool and the sweat of a long journey carried past its natural end — the particular sourness of people who had stopped apologising for their existence and simply occupied it.
Wooden-slatted seats ran in pairs down a narrow aisle. Most of them were full. A woman near the front had a child folded against her side, his cheek pressed to her coat, his shoes not quite reaching the floor.
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An older man three rows back had his cap pulled low and his arms crossed and the deliberate stillness of someone who had learned that the best way to travel was to become temporarily unavailable. A young farmer with mud dried into the creases of his boots sat very upright, hands on his knees, watching the window with the focused attention of a man who had somewhere important to be and no faith that he would arrive.
Outside, the last of the afternoon moved orange across flat land. Fields ran to distant tree lines without drama. Telephone poles ticked past in their even rhythm. A pair of horses stood at a fence line watching the road with animal patience.
Then a military truck. Parked at the roadside, canvas back open, two soldiers sitting on the tailgate eating from tin cups. Not eating hurriedly. Just eating. Watching the bus pass the way people watched things they did not intend to stop.
The farmer’s hands tightened on his knees.
The woman pulled her sleeping child slightly closer without looking down at him.
The older man did not lift his cap.
Near the back, a young man slept with his forehead against the glass.
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His jacket was good fabric, slightly wrong for this landscape — the cut of it, the colour, the way it sat on his shoulders. American, if you knew what to look for. A leather bag sat wedged between his feet with a buckle that caught the light when the bus turned. His hands lay loose and open in his lap. His breathing was slow and even. Whatever was happening outside the window had not found him yet.
The bus slowed.
Not gradually. The decision of it — the driver’s foot finding the brake with purpose.
“Checkpoint,” the driver said quietly, to no one specifically. “Everyone stay seated, please.”
The word moved through the bus before anyone spoke it back. The woman checked her documents before the soldiers had even boarded. The farmer produced his from his breast pocket with the speed of someone who had rehearsed this. The older man finally lifted his cap — just enough to see clearly — and his face, now visible, was the face of a man who had survived enough history to recognise the shape of more coming.
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Two soldiers boarded through the front doors. Young — both of them, not yet thirty, with the careful posture of men who had been told to project authority recently enough that they were still measuring how it fit. Their uniforms were clean. Their rifles were slung but present. One moved up the left side. One took the right.
The left-side soldier was efficient. Documents in, documents checked, documents returned. A nod. Move on. He worked with the economy of someone who had done this three times today already and expected to do it three more times before dark.
The right-side soldier was slower.
He had a way of looking at people that paused before it moved on — not lingering, exactly, but noting. He reached the woman with the child and checked her papers twice, not because they were wrong but because she had been holding them too tightly, which was the sort of thing that made a man wonder. He handed them back without comment and she exhaled a breath she hadn’t known she was keeping.
He reached the farmer and looked at the mud on his boots before he looked at the documents.
“Where are you coming from?”
“Tarnów,” the farmer said. His voice was level.
“And before Tarnów?”
“My sister’s. Outside Rzeszów. I was helping with the harvest.”
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The soldier looked at him. At the mud. At the calluses on his hands.
“Move on,” he said, and did.
He reached the back of the bus.
He looked at the young man sleeping against the window and was still for a moment. At the bag between his feet. At the jacket. At the American cut of the collar.
He reached out and gripped the young man’s shoulder.
The young man came awake badly.
His head came up too fast, one hand shooting out to grab the seat back ahead of him, eyes open but not focused — cycling through confusion the way a man did when sleep had been deep and the interruption was sudden and wrong. He looked at the soldier without seeing him properly. He looked at the interior of the bus. At the window. At the flat land outside, trying to locate himself in it.
“Documents,” the soldier said.
The young man blinked. His hand went to his jacket pocket by instinct. Missed. Tried again. Found the wrong pocket.
“Documents. Now.”
“Yes — yes, I—” His Polish came out sleep-blurred at the edges, slightly flattened in a way that made the soldier go very still. He found the papers at last and held them out. His hand was not quite steady.
The soldier took them. Read. His expression didn’t change, which was its own kind of change.
“You’re travelling alone.”
“Yes.”
“Where from?”
“Gdynia. Before that—” The young man pressed his knuckles briefly against his eyes, trying to clear them. “I came from America. New York. I was—”
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“America.”
“Yes.”
The soldier looked at the jacket again. Slowly. “For how long?”
“Two years. I was studying.”
“Studying what.”
“Engineering.” He straightened slightly, as if the word gave him something to lean on. “I finished my programme. I’m going home.”
The soldier did not hand the papers back. He read them a second time. Then a third. Not because there was more to read. Because he was deciding something.
“You speak strangely,” he said.
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“I’ve been away two years.”
“Two years in New York.” The word sat in the soldier’s mouth in a particular way. “And before New York?”
“Warsaw. I grew up in Warsaw. My father—”
“What route did you take from Gdynia?”
“Train to Poznań. Then the bus from—”
“Which train?.”
“I—” The young man stopped. Something in the soldier’s face had shifted while he was talking, a quality of attention that was no longer checking and had become something closer to suspicion settled. “I don’t remember the number. It was the morning departure. I’ve been travelling four days, I wasn’t—”
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“A young man with an American bag and a foreign accent on a bus from Gdynia who cannot name his train.” The soldier’s voice had not risen. That was worse. “Who do you work for?”
“My father.” He heard his own voice and didn’t like what was in it. “I told you, I just finished—”
“Your father’s name.”
“Józef. Józef Adler. He lives on Złota Street, he’s—”
“Karol.”
The voice came from the front of the aisle, level and unhurried. The left-side soldier had stopped and turned. He walked back without rushing, which was its own form of authority — the authority of a man who did not need to hurry to be taken seriously. He held out his hand for the papers without asking.
Karol surrendered them with a fraction of reluctance.
The second soldier read them and was quiet for a moment. Then he looked at the young man properly.
“Adler,” he said. “Elias Adler.”
“Yes.”
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Something in the second soldier’s posture reorganised itself. Not relaxing. Recalibrating.
“I know your father,” he said. “Józef Adler. Złota Street.” He handed the papers back with both hands, a small formality. “He redesigned the drainage on our side of the district. Three years ago — maybe four. Half the street used to flood every spring.”
The young man — Elias — took the papers. “Yes,” he said, more quietly. “He mentioned that job.”
“He’s a good man.” The second soldier said it simply, as a fact among facts. “You look like him.”
“People say that.”
“And you passed? The engineering programme?”
“Last week.” Something shifted in Elias’s shoulders. Not confidence returning so much as the rigid thing that had replaced it beginning to ease. “I passed.”
The second soldier nodded once — a genuine nod, the kind that came from actually caring about the answer. “He’ll be glad. He talked about it when you left. Told anyone who would listen.” A pause that had something almost warm in it. “You gave him something to be proud of while you were gone.”
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Karol made a sound in his throat that was not agreement and not objection but sat uncomfortably between them.
The second soldier glanced at him. Something passed between the two men that didn’t require words. Karol looked at the floor of the bus for a moment, and when he looked up his face had shed the particular quality it had carried since he’d reached the back row.
“You,” Karol said to Elias. Flat. Stripped of what had been in it before, leaving something that was almost, though not quite, embarrassed. “Next time a soldier asks you questions at a checkpoint, you answer them properly.”
Elias nodded once. His voice came out smaller than he intended. “Yes. I will.”
Karol moved back up the aisle without further ceremony. The second soldier lingered.
“Keep your papers where you can reach them,” he said quietly. Not a reprimand. A transfer of information between people. “Things are not the same as when you left. It will be worse before it improves.”
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Elias looked at him. “In New York, people talked about it. I thought—” He stopped. “I thought they were being dramatic.”
The soldier held his gaze for a moment. He did not say they weren’t. He did not need to. “Welcome home, Elias,” he said instead, and walked to the front.
The soldiers stepped off. One of them said something brief to the driver — apologetic in cadence if not in word. The driver waved it off with the resignation of a man who had been apologised to at four checkpoints this week and had stopped knowing what to do with it.
The doors closed.
The engine found its rhythm again.
Elias sat with his papers in his lap and did not put them away.
Through the rear window, the checkpoint fell behind — the two soldiers moving back to their posts, the road bending, a line of trees taking it from view. Somewhere behind those trees, another military truck sat on another road. He knew this without seeing it. The shape of the last hour had told him.
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He turned forward.
The bus carried on into the evening. The fields came and went. The orange light was going grey at its edges now, the way it did in late August when summer remembered it had somewhere else to be. A village passed — a church, a well, a woman in a doorway watching the road with an expression that had nothing casual in it.
Elias’s hands lay still in his lap.
He was not the kind of man whose face gave much away. He had not been, even before — before whatever the next months would make of him, before the world got around to teaching him what it intended to teach. But something was working behind his eyes now, quiet and unhurried, the way a man recalculated a distance when the road turned out to be longer than the map had said.
He had laughed about it in New York.
Not cruelly. Not stupidly. Just — at a remove of several thousand kilometres, with lectures to attend and equations to solve and a city that was very good at making everything elsewhere feel theoretical, he had heard people talk about Poland and Europe and the Germans and he had nodded and moved on.
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The bus moved through a junction where a signpost had been taken down.
The post was still there. The sign was not. Just the bracket where it had been, and the pale square on the wood where weather hadn’t reached.
Elias looked at it until it was behind him.
Then he looked at his papers, still in his hands, and finally put them away.
The papers went into his pocket.
Outside, the light had finished its argument with the day and lost. The fields had gone from orange to grey to the particular blue-dark of a Polish August evening — the kind that arrived without drama and stayed without apology. A crow lifted from a fence post as the bus passed and did not return to it. Further along the road, a farmhouse sat with every window lit, not in warmth but in the slightly desperate way of a house that had turned on all its lights against something that lights had no answer for.
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Elias watched it until the road bent and took it away.
The boy moved in his sleep.
Just a small thing — one fist unclenching against his mother’s coat, his head settling more heavily onto her arm — but it drew Elias’s eye forward, and he found the woman already watching him. Not with curiosity. With the expression of a person who had been sitting three rows away during an interrogation and had decided, now that it was over, that the decent thing was to acknowledge it.
“Forgive me,” she said. Quietly, under the engine noise. “I heard everything. Karol — the soldier — he had no right to speak to you that way.”
“It’s not yours to apologise for,” Elias said.
“No,” she agreed. “But someone should.” She said it simply, without building anything on top of it, and then let it go the way people did when they meant what they said and didn’t need it validated.
Her coat was good quality — wool, charcoal grey — with a careful repair at the left cuff that had been done with a slightly different thread. Her hair was pinned back with the efficiency of a woman whose mornings didn’t allow for anything slower. On her lapel, very small, a brooch in the shape of a bird in flight — silver, the wing tips worn smooth from handling. The kind of object that had been touched many times for comfort.
“My name is Elias,” he said.
“Roza,” she replied. “Roza Katz.” She adjusted the boy’s weight. “And this is David. He would tell you himself but he has apparently decided that checkpoints don’t concern him.”
“How old?”
“Five in December.” The pride in it was quiet and entirely unguarded, the kind that didn’t know it was pride because it had never been anything else. “He slept through the rifles and the boots and Karol’s finest interrogation voice.” She shook her head. “I almost didn’t wake him. What he doesn’t know—”
She stopped herself precisely there.
Elias looked at the boy. At the dark lashes against his cheek. At the small hand fisted loosely in sleep, as if even unconscious he was holding onto something.
“He looks like a serious person,” Elias said.
“He is,” Roza said. “Extraordinarily serious. He told me last week, very gravely, that he intends to build a machine that feeds the dog automatically so he doesn’t have to get up early.”
“That,” Elias said, “is a real problem that deserves a real solution.”
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“That’s what I told him.” Something opened in her face — not quite a laugh, warmer than a smile. “He has a notebook for his diagrams. He won’t let anyone touch it.”
Something moved through Elias at that. He didn’t name it.
“Where are you coming from?” he asked.
“Kraków. My husband’s family.” She said it with a particular evenness — not flat, just managed, the way you said something with an edge to it when you had decided the edge wasn’t for public use. “We go every summer. This year I nearly didn’t. I kept thinking we should stay — that leaving Warsaw even for two weeks felt wrong somehow.” She looked at the window. “In the end I went because I thought — I had a feeling it would be the last chance for a while.”
Neither of them looked at each other when she said a while.
“You came from America,” she said, moving along with the practical instinct of a woman who knew how long you could look at a thing before it looked back. “New York, I heard.”
“Two years,” Elias said.
Her expression opened — the running calculation behind her eyes pausing, genuinely, to make room for curiosity. “What is it like?”
Elias looked at the ceiling of the bus for a moment, because the answer was genuinely large and he was trying to find the edge of it.
“The first thing is the noise,” he said. “It doesn’t stop. Not at two in the morning, not at four. The city simply doesn’t — it has no off position. I didn’t sleep properly for three months.”
“That sounds exhausting.”
“It was. And then one morning I woke up and realised I’d stopped hearing it. It had become the background. Like weather.” He paused. “And after that I loved it. You walk down the street and everyone has come from somewhere else and everyone arrived with almost nothing and everyone is building something from it anyway. There’s a feeling there — I don’t know how else to say it — that what you do matters more than where you started.”
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Roza was quiet. The genuine kind of quiet — not formulating a response, just letting the thing land.
“My uncle went,” she said. “To New York. 1923. He writes letters that sound like—” She paused. “Like he invented himself there. Like the person he was in Łódź was a draft and New York was the final version.” A beat. “He keeps telling us to come.”
“You should,” Elias said. He said it without thinking, and then wondered if it was too much to say to a stranger.
Roza looked at her son.
“My husband says after the children are a little older. After we’ve saved a little more.” Her voice was even. “There’s always an after.” She caught herself. “What I mean is — we keep finding reasons to wait for the right moment. And the right moment keeps—” She turned her palm up slightly, a small gesture. “Moving.”
Outside, the bus passed through the edge of a town. A square, a fountain switched off for the evening. A post office with a queue outside it that had no business being that long at this hour — eight, ten people, some of them carrying documents held with both hands. A man near the front of the queue had a suitcase at his feet, already packed. He was not going anywhere tonight. The suitcase understood something he was still deciding.
Roza’s eyes moved to the queue and away again in one motion.
“What do you do?” Elias asked. “Your work.”
“Accounts. Textile factory off Grzybowska.” She said it without modesty or apology. “I’ve been there eight years. I know every number in that building.”
“Eight years in the same place — you probably run it by now.”
She gave him a look that was both amused and slightly sharp. “I do,” she said. “They just haven’t told me yet.”
Elias almost laughed. It surprised him.
“And you?” she asked. “Engineering, I heard.”
“My father’s business. Infrastructure, drainage, foundations. He wanted me to learn the technical side properly.” He paused. “He talked about sending me to New York for years before I actually went. Every Sunday dinner. The same speech.” Something warm moved through his voice. “My mother started mouthing the words behind his back.”
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Roza smiled. “Was it hard? To leave?”
The question arrived somewhere specific and Elias let it.
“My sister Anna was seven,” he said. “She cried for three days. I know because my mother wrote to warn me — I think she was partly saying don’t come back yet, give her time to forget she was angry at you.” He paused. “Anna wrote me letters. Every week, almost. For the entire two years.”
“Every week,” Roza repeated. Not surprised. Moved.
“She wrote them like — she treated the street outside our window like a subject worth studying. The neighbour’s cat and which windowsill it preferred on which days. A cracked tile on our front step that she decided looked like a map of somewhere that didn’t exist.” He shook his head. “She spent half a letter on that tile. The cartography of it. Whether the crack had grown since the previous week.”
“She sounds like a writer,” Roza said.
“She wanted to be. Very seriously. She had a notebook she wouldn’t let anyone touch.” He stopped. “Then she changed her mind. Now she wants to be a veterinarian. She can’t bear to see animals hurt.” He looked at David sleeping. “There’s an old dog in our building — half blind, moves like his joints are filing a complaint — and Anna brings him scraps before school every morning. She’s done it for two years. Without being asked. Without telling anyone. My mother only found out because a neighbour mentioned it.”
Roza looked at him for a long moment.
“She sounds like someone,” she said quietly, “who is going to matter very much to a great many people.”
Elias looked down at his hands.
“Yes,” he said. “She is.”
A military vehicle passed in the opposite direction. Neither of them spoke while it passed. They didn’t exchange a look either — that would have been too much acknowledgement. They simply held their separate silences side by side until the sound of it was gone, and then Roza exhaled through her nose, a breath she had been holding without noticing, and the conversation found its feet again.
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“I have another sister,” Elias said. He said it differently from how he had said Anna’s name — more carefully, the way one approached ground that had not been tested recently. “Margaret. Fifteen.”
Roza waited.
“She has been quiet for some years now.” He turned his jacket cuff over in his fingers without looking at it. “She was not always so. When she was eight — perhaps nine — she began saying things. Strange things. About what was coming. About Anna and me.” He stopped. “She spoke of it the way one reported the weather. Calmly. With great certainty. As though she were simply telling us what she already knew.”
“What manner of things?”
“That Anna and I would die.” He said it plainly, because there was no other way to say it and he had had seven years to find one. “Together. In a room with no air. She described it once, in detail, and my mother — “
He stopped.
“My mother wept. In private. I was twelve and I heard her through the wall and I did not know what to do with that.”
Roza said nothing. The right kind of nothing.
“We tried every physician in Warsaw,” Elias said. “No one had an answer. No framework for it. One man said it was a disturbance of nerves. Another said she would outgrow it.” His jaw shifted slightly. “Eventually she simply — stopped. The words stopped and Margaret went quiet and my father said she had turned a corner.”
He looked at the window.
“She had not turned a corner,” he said. “She had made a decision.”
Roza looked at him carefully. “What decision?”
“That telling us was unkind,” Elias said. “I believe she decided it served no one to keep saying the thing she saw. So she kept it and said nothing.” A pause. “She has been like that since. Present. Watchful. But — elsewhere, somehow. As though part of her attention is always on something the rest of us cannot see.”
He was quiet for a moment.
“In her letters she asks after my studies. She asks whether I am eating properly.” Something moved through his expression that was not quite amusement and not quite grief. “She never speaks of herself. Two years of letters and I could not tell you what Margaret wants, or hopes for, or fears. Only that she is there. And that she is waiting for me to come home.”
He said the last sentence simply. He did not examine it further. But it sat between them with a weight that neither of them chose to address, and after a moment Roza looked at her sleeping son, and Elias looked at the darkness outside the window, and the bus carried on toward Warsaw.
Roza was quiet. Outside a dog was barking at something invisible in a darkened field, the sound getting closer and then past and then diminishing, and the darkness outside the window was thicker now, proper night arriving with the particular finality of August darkness in Poland, which came earlier than you expected and stayed longer than you wanted.
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Then Roza said, carefully:
“I dream sometimes that I’m standing somewhere I don’t recognise. A street, or a room — it changes. And David is there, and he’s older. Older than now.” She looked at her son with an expression that had no name, or too many. “Everything in the dream is just — ordinary. David is doing something ordinary. Getting a glass of water. Reading something. Complaining about something.” She paused. “I wake up from that dream more relieved than I’ve ever been about anything. And then I have to spend a moment working out whether what I dreamed is a memory I don’t have yet, or something I’m simply hoping for.”
She said it to the window, not to him. As if she needed to say it but had not decided to say it to anyone in particular.
Elias looked at her profile. At the brooch on her lapel, the worn silver wing tips. At David’s notebook — he had one, it turned out, tucked into the bag at their feet, corners soft from use.
“In New York,” Elias said quietly, “when people talked about the war — what might be coming — I used to nod and go back to my equations. Not because I didn’t believe them.” He paused. “I think I just needed it to stay theoretical for a little longer.”
Roza turned from the window.
They looked at each other with the specific understanding of two people who have said enough true things to each other that the pretence of small talk is no longer available.
“Your Margaret,” Roza said, after a moment. “The dreams she had.”
“Yes.”
“Do you think she saw something real?”
Elias was quiet for long enough that the question had space around it.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve thought about it more than I’ve admitted to anyone.” He paused. “But I think — whatever she saw — she saw it because she loves us. And whatever it means, she carried it alone because she didn’t want to frighten us anymore.” He exhaled. “Thirteen years old.”
Roza looked at him steadily. “She sounds like someone who loves her family very much.”
“She does,” Elias said. “She just doesn’t know how to say it without it sounding like a warning.”
The bus slowed.
Roza glanced at the window — a corner, a particular building, the name of a street she knew — and her posture shifted with the small internal click of arrival.
“This is us,” she said.
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She reached beneath the seat for their bag — heavier than it looked, lifted with the ease of someone accustomed to its weight — and then turned to David. He resisted consciousness with the complete moral authority of a five-year-old who has decided the world can wait.
“David.” She brushed his hair back from his forehead. “My love. We’re home.”
He surfaced slowly. Blinked. Looked at the window with profound suspicion. Then he looked at Elias — directly, without self-consciousness, the way small children looked at strangers before they learned that looking was complicated.
His eyes were very dark. Very clear. He had the look of a child who was already collecting the world into categories that would eventually become something worth building.
Elias raised his hand. A small wave.
David considered this with the gravity appropriate to an important decision. Then he raised one finger — held it there with the solemnity of a small ceremony — and lowered it again, and turned and pressed his face into his mother’s neck.
Roza stood. She gathered the bag onto her shoulder, took David’s hand, and looked at Elias one last time with the expression of someone completing something that had mattered more than she had expected when it began.
“I hope your Anna is exactly as you described,” she said. “I hope she’s still writing about that tile.”
“I hope your David builds his machine,” Elias said. “And I hope it works.”
Something moved across her face. Not quite a smile. A recognition — of the weight behind the words, and of the weight behind his, and of the fact that neither of them were really talking about notebooks and dog-feeding machines and they both knew it.
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“Goodbye, Elias,” she said.
“Goodbye, Roza.”
She moved up the aisle. David’s hand in hers. The bag over her shoulder. The doors opened and the night came in — cool, carrying the faint thread of a radio broadcast from somewhere nearby, words indistinct but the cadence of it unmistakable, the particular serious rhythm of an announcer who was not reading the weather — and then the doors closed and they were gone.
Elias turned to the window.
On the pavement, Roza adjusted David’s collar against the night air. He said something and she bent to hear it and whatever it was made her shake her head and then, despite herself, smile. She took his hand again and they walked away from the bus stop into the lit street — into the Warsaw evening, into the windows and the voices and the radio still threading its careful words through the air above the city.
David was skipping. Not continuously — just every few steps, when the mood took him, one small skip between ordinary footsteps, as if the world were intermittently worth the extra effort.
Roza did not look back.
The bus pulled out.
Elias watched them until the street curved and the lamplight took them, and then he faced forward and the city came to meet him — denser now, the roads joining each other, the buildings pressing closer, the signs for streets he had grown up reading — and somewhere on Złota Street a window was lit, and behind it a nine-year-old girl with a notebook had been counting the days, scratching tally marks into the margin the way she tallied everything that mattered, and tomorrow she would stop counting because he would be home.
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He did not know what else tomorrow would bring.
The radio cadence followed the bus for another block, then fell away into the sounds of the city.
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