She stood up, fists clenched, jaw tight. “And now I’m being everything they expect me to be. Weak. Unable to put up with the teasing. A tale-teller. Forget I said anything. But I guess…” She hesitated. “I think of you as a friend first and the guy in charge second. Which I should probably stop doing.”

She turned and hurried out, taking the jeep and pushing it out along the road to the north, camera ready for whatever she might find in the land that lay beyond reality.

Fifteen

As Jess drove, she remembered the story she’d wanted to write but had been too scared to pursue. Until now. So she didn’t go as far as the Ardennes. Instead, almost hating herself for doing it because how could she betray the men she’d seen burned alive in the tank yesterday, but knowing that if she didn’t, she was betraying all of the women instead, she stopped near Sedan. She knocked on doors, spoke to the women, asked them about the soldiers who’d passed through, both German and American. What were they like? How did they treat the villagers? Did they ask for what they wanted or did they just take whatever they thought they had a right to?

Not many women would speak to her once her questions changed from the general to the specific. But she kept asking, kept taking notes, kept photographing these women who’d seen more than anyone knew since 1940. One woman, Marie-Laure, whose husband was a prisoner of war in Germany and whose father had been killed by the Germans for helping downed British airmen evade capture, asked Jess to dine with her and her mother.

“We only have a little bread, and some cheese,” Marie-Laure said. She looked to be about eighteen, but that could just be the effect of poor diet over the long years of war.

“I have chocolate, and cigarettes,” Jess said, offering the two items that were more sought after than money.

Marie-Laure’s mother accepted both with a silent nod. In fact, she didn’t speak at all over dinner. But her daughter did.

“We always give our food and our cows and our chickens to the soldiers,” Marie-Laure said as she smoked a Lucky Strike, ignoring the food. “But then there were no more chickens or cows to give, and the vegetables in the garden were too small. Unsatisfactory. My father had a pilot hiding in the cellar. The Germans came. Perhaps…perhaps we should have given them the pilot. But then they would have taken my father too. So—”

Marie-Laure shrugged, stood up and walked over to kiss the top of her mother’s head.

“They told us to choose,” Marie-Laure continued quietly. “Me, or my mother. So I went with them to the bedroom. There were four men. The fifth was given the job of keeping my mother and father in the kitchen.”

Jess’s pen moved over her paper. She did not look up as Marie-Laure spoke because she sensed her shame, that she did not want Jess’s eyes on her while she talked. Jess wanted to shout: You aren’t the one who should be ashamed! But Marie-Laure hadn’t yet finished.