“But she can’t resist yours?” Jennings spoke with more anger than Jess had ever heard in him. “What was your proof?”

“Her accreditation pass.”

Jess whipped around, not wanting to hear any more. Because it all began to make sense. The little things that kept disappearing from her room. One day her accreditation pass was missing, the next day it was back where she’d thought she’d left it. Her little vial of perfume had vanished but never reappeared. Socks gone one day and then back the next. A precious pair of the very few knickers she’d brought with her evaporating into the general miasma of war. She’d imagined that when she’d washed them and hung them over the bushes to dry they’d been taken by the wind. That the perfume had perhaps been borrowed by one of the WACs who’d forgotten to return it.

But what she’d just heard meant that everything she’d believed—that the men had accepted her presence and thought of her as nothing more than one of their number—wasn’t true. The misogynist cabal was just as bad here as in Paris.

They’d started a club. A club that required one of her possessions as an entry pass, possessions gained, she gathered, after she’d supposedly succumbed to the men’s charms. Goddamn you, Warren Stone, Jess seethed. Goddamn you, Sparrow, and every other member of the J Club. Then her heart stopped. Did Dan know about it?

She didn’t bother to retrieve her notebook. She stormed back into the chateau and found Marty, who’d been laid low in her room the past two days. “Let’s go find a story,” Jess said. “We’ll drive up to the Ardennes. See if it’s true.”

Martha groaned. “My stomach is turning itself inside out. I don’t know how you bounce around here looking so goddamn young and beautiful and healthy while my guts have turned to water and I feel like a crone.”

Jess sat down beside her friend, anger momentarily quelled and determined not to burden her sick friend with her own problems. “I’ll take you to the hospital. They can get you rehydrated and up and about more quickly than if you stay here eating rations.”

“They won’t want me taking up a bed.”

“Anne’s there. She won’t mind. Besides, you’re supposed to be staying there anyway and with the fighting having slowed, they’ll have room. Let’s go.”

Jess bullied Martha until she acquiesced. It gave her something to think about other than the club and whether Dan knew. She packed Marty, weak as a newborn kitten, into her jeep. At the field hospital, Anne promised to get Martha on a drip and told Jess to pick her up in two days. Which left Jess without a jeep partner to travel to the Belgian border.

“I’ll come,” said Catherine Coyne, another correspondent who’d been posted at the field hospital.

“There are reports that the Germans are attacking the front,” Jess said. “It could be bloody.”

“I see the results of it here,” Catherine said, waving her arms around the hospital. “It can’t be much worse out there.”