The Nightingale

by Kristin Hannah

In love we find out who we want to be; in war we find out who we are. Today’s young people want to know everything about everyone. They think talking about a problem will solve it. I come from a quieter generation. We understand the value of forgetting, the lure of reinvention.

He loves a version of me that is incomplete. I always thought it was what I wanted: to be loved and admired. Now I think perhaps I’d like to be known.

Chaos. Dust. Crowds. The street was a living, breathing dragon of humanity, inching forward, wheezing dirt, honking horns; people yelling for help, babies crying, and the smell of sweat heavy in the air.

The look in those eyes was as sharp as the point of his chin, and revealed a kind of clarified hunger. Last night she’d thought it was how he’d looked at her. Now she saw that it was how he looked at the world.

She saw love in his eyes. What did words matter after that? She was wiser than she’d been before. Now she knew how fragile life and love were. Maybe she would love him for only this day, or maybe for only the next week, or maybe until she was an old, old woman. Maybe he would be the love of her life . . . or her love for the duration of this war . . . or maybe he would only be her first love. All she really knew was that in this terrible, frightening world, she had stumbled into something unexpected. And she would not let it go again.

“This is what they have done to us. We are afraid of our own shadows.”

“But love has to be stronger than hate, or there is no future for us.”

For the first time in days, weeks, a year, her heart was a reliable thing, pumping with life. When he drew back, he stared down at her and the love in his eyes burned away everything bad; it was just them again, Gaëtan and Isabelle, somehow falling in love in a world at war.

Wounds heal. Love lasts. We remain.