Catherine broke down then, sobbing into Jess’s shoulder, while Jess tried to keep her own tears in her eyes and not break down too.

“Shhh,” Jess whispered as she rubbed Catherine’s back, praying that the Stukas wouldn’t fly past again, cursing herself for bringing the girl with her. The girl. The boys. They were all the same age as Jess but sometimes she felt a thousand years old: how could anyone ever laugh again after seeing men imprisoned in flame, dying a terrible death.

A long moan had rent the air as the tank exploded. Jess had somehow imagined it came from the tank but as she lifted her head she saw that it had come from Emile, that his mind was desiccated by slaughter. “Go home,” she said to him, not unkindly. “There’s nothing for you here. There’s nothing here for any of us.”

It was the truth but Emile still glared at her. “That’s why it suits you,” he said bitterly. “Because you are nothing. Nothing more than a face and a smile.”

“You forgot to mention the body,” she said, the words acid on her tongue, before she stood up with Catherine and walked away.

It was a long four-hour trek back to Reims with a nervous Catherine, who wanted Jess to stay at the hospital rather than go back to the chateau on her own. It was tempting, Jess had to admit. But she didn’t want to give Jennings or Sparrow or anyone else a chance to take any more souvenirs from her room, nor did she want to admit that she was scared to go back, scared to walk into a chateau with men she’d thought were on her side but who, she now understood, still saw her first and foremost as the woman in the picture with the naked back, the woman whom any man would want warming his godforsaken bed. She wanted to cry, and she couldn’t do it there.

She made it back near midnight and didn’t bother to eat, just fell into bed in her nest in the attic. But sleep was on the wrong side of the front and she couldn’t reach it. Every time she closed her eyes, the image of the burning men inside the tank scalded her eyes. Instead she lay, staring up at the ceiling, listening to the sounds of the officers on the floors below, the laughter of the men in the tents in the fields drifting through her windows, Emile’s words—you are nothing—striking her ears like machine gun fire. It was what every man at Reims thought. Emile had been the only one brave enough to say it to her face.

* * *

The GIs’ laughter rang on through the night. Jess’s nightmares were of fire, and of men gathered in packs in their tents, sniggering over a woman they’d turned into a coin-operated machine. All they had to do was put in enough whiskey or perfume or money and her body would be theirs, for as long as it continued to amuse them.