According to the hotel’s records and the testimony of the bellboy who delivered the letter, it arrived in George Morrow’s hands the next day while he sat in the lobby, waiting for news of his wife. He gave the messenger a ten cent tip and opened the envelope immediately.

So Irene hadn’t given her husband much thought. If there was one thing George Morrow could do better than just about anybody in the world, it was to handle the press. She figured—when she had time to think about it at all—that he had given the world some statement that skirted the truth, that made him out to be a patient, generous husband who wanted nothing for his wife but her happiness. She had, in fact, not the least idea that she had disappeared without trace, that she might now be clinging to survival amid the wreckage of her airplane in the middle of the Sahara, that the attention of the world was fixed on her, that hundreds of people were even now employed in a desperate race against the clock to find her. She would have been appalled; she would have been furious with George.

But she didn’t know any of this. If she had, she would have broken her silence long before she actually did crash in a desert, not in North Africa but in Spain, about three hundred and fifty kilometers northeast of Madrid.

As the Potez hit the ground, Irene expected to die instantly. She had forgotten that there was nobody in the world who had crashed an airplane so often and so skillfully as Sam Mallory. It was almost as if his entire career had been made in preparation for this moment, when the ship he was piloting—the one carrying the only person left to him on earth, in urgent need of medical care—ran out of fuel because some German bullet had pierced the main fuel tank, which went unnoticed until half an hour into the flight, when he was already over the strip of Nationalist territory between the Basques and Madrid.

The impact was like the end of the world. An almighty bang jolted through the metal frame and everything went flying, except Irene. She was strapped down not just to the stretcher but to the main deck itself, so that she was part of the airplane as it hurtled across the surface of the desert, over rocks and through bushes, bouncing and crashing and skidding until it came to rest at last, tail torn away, landing gear collapsed, propeller blades scattered across the desert floor.

Then silence.

The shock of it numbed Irene’s physical pain. She stared at the bare struts that ran along the top of this metal tube in which she was bound, unable to move. She tried to scream Sam’s name, even to whisper it, but she had no strength at all, not even that. Maybe I’m dead, she thought. A shaft of sunlight poured through some broken window. The pain returned. Her ears rang with it. Her lips were cracked and thirsty. She closed her eyes and thought, So this is how I die.

Some time later, Irene opened her eyes to sunshine and a desert landscape, a curious rock formation, pain such as she had never known. Something cool touched her forehead. Sam? she whispered.

I’m here, he said. The pressure of his hand on hers.

What’s happened?

We’ve crashed. We ran out of fuel. Waiting for help.

Sam?

What is it, Irene?

How bad am I?

He didn’t answer right away, and Irene thought that he wasn’t going to tell her, and she was angry. She had a right to know what was wrong with her body! She had a right to know what was causing this pain. She had a right to know if she was going to live or die. She had a right to know if her baby was dead.

Then he started to speak. He said that she was burned, on the side of her face and on her back, and that her left arm had been broken by some falling debris. The rest was cuts and bruises. He said she might lose the arm, but not to worry, because he always liked the right arm better anyway. As for her face, why, it just made her more interesting.

Sam? she said.

What is it, Irene?

I can’t feel the baby move. Is the baby still there?

There was a fragile silence.

Then: Don’t worry about the baby, said Sam.

Why not? said Irene. Why not worry? Is he gone? Is he gone, Sam? Tell me the truth. Is he gone?

Irene, said Sam. Irene.

Irene wasn’t crying, but a few tears slid from the corners of her eyes and down her temples into her ears. More followed, until they bled into each other, but she wasn’t crying. Her chest didn’t move, except in shallow, delicate breaths. A line of water ran from each eye. That was all.

When they had crashed in the middle of the night, Sam had carried her out of the wrecked fuselage because he was afraid of fumes. Now it was morning, and the desert heat began to take hold. They lay quietly in the shade while Irene dangled between sleep and hazy half-consciousness, and Sam gave her water and stroked her hair. In a moment of lucidity, she asked if he was hurt.

“Oh, just my bum ankle,” he said.

“Can you walk?”

“A little.”

“You should walk. You should try to find help.”

He was smoking a cigarette. She could smell the tobacco, a more pungent variety than the ones he used to smoke back in California. She wanted to turn her head and look at him, and possibly she could have done if she tried hard enough, but her skull felt so heavy and her neck so stiff. So she just imagined him instead, hair askew, smoking thoughtfully against a boulder or something while a blue sky surrounded him.

“Irene,” he said, “there’s nobody for miles. This is the desert, the badlands.”

“You should try.”

“Can’t leave you here alone. Might be days.”

“Then at least you’d save yourself.”

“Sweetheart,” he said, stroking her hair, “don’t worry. They’ll send someone out to look for us. Just sit tight, all right?”

“Oh, I’m not going anywhere, believe me.”

He laughed and kissed her forehead and said she was the same old Irene, the same good sport, game for anything. What he didn’t say was that his bum ankle was actually broken in several places, and that his left ear was nearly torn off, and a deep gash cut through to the bone of his left thigh, narrowly missing the femoral artery. No, he wasn’t going anywhere, and certainly not miles out into the scorching desert. Not unless he had to.

Still, when night fell again, Sam managed to drag her back into the fuselage, which had settled deep enough in the earth that it was not such a great height, just a ledge. In the darkness, she couldn’t see the blood, or his mangled face, so she didn’t know how much effort this required. She went to sleep, and sometime during the night she dreamed that they were outside, the three of them, alone in the night, Sam and Irene and their dead child, who was wrapped in a bundle in Sam’s arms so she couldn’t touch him or see him. She tried to scream, to give some voice to her anguish, but the peculiar paralysis of dreams had stiffened her so she could neither move nor speak. The stars twinkled coldly at her grief. Even though she couldn’t actually say the words, she heard her own voice ask Sam where they should bury the baby, and he replied that when the sun rose he would dig a hole beneath a boulder nearby that reminded him of a bear.

She realized she was awake. She asked Sam to repeat what he had just said.

“I buried him with my own bare hands in the graveyard next to the airfield,” Sam said.

“Him,” Irene said.

“Yes. The commandant promised to put up a headstone when the bombing stops.”

As he spoke, Sam made some rustling movements. Irene didn’t know he was binding up his thigh and his ankle with some gauze in the medical kit. The iodine and the morphine he saved for her, because he knew that burns were the most painful wounds of all, and the most susceptible to infection.

“Did you give him a name?” Irene asked. “Will there be a name on the stone?”

“Henry Foster Mallory. Is that all right?”

Irene couldn’t think. She didn’t remember that she herself had told Sam, if their baby was a boy, to name their son after her father. Between the physical pain and the morphine for the pain, there was not enough room for memory or even grief. She only felt grief when she was asleep.

But she wanted to feel grief. She wanted to mourn. So she just said, Yes, that’s perfect, and let herself go.

After that, Irene did not want to live. She could survive the loss of a baby, because women did that all the time, and she could survive pain because she had experienced physical agony so often before. But she could not survive both at once, and when their water began to run out the next day, there was just no point in living, was there? Nobody was going to rescue them. She begged Sam to take his service pistol and shoot her. If she were dead, he could keep the rest of the water for himself; he could go for help, he could save himself.

Sam said that if she were dead, he would have no reason to save himself. He went on changing her bandages. He moved her inside the airplane, to shelter her from the sun, and sat with her, and brushed her hair, and wrote in his diary. He said he wanted some record of events to survive when the wreckage was found. In case his Pixie ever grew up and wondered what had happened to her father.