“When the last one was nearly done, the others left the room. They came back with my mother. And they made me watch.”

Jess’s eyes burned with useless tears.

“The next day, they returned.” Marie-Laure lit another cigarette. “My mother hadn’t been able to leave her bed since they’d gone. My father was on the floor by the bed crying. The Boche took the pilot, and my father. It had all been for nothing.”

* * *

It had all been for nothing. The words rang in Jess’s head as she drove back to Reims.

And Marie-Laure had said one last terrible thing to Jess before she left.

“Two weeks ago, some Americans were here. This time, I just took off my dress. It hurts less when you don’t struggle.”

Jess knew that nobody would publish it if she wrote it into a story. Nobody wanted to read about American soldiers raping the women of a country that had been under German rule for years, behaving as everyone imagined the Germans did. Nobody wanted to see what lay beneath the resignation on Marie-Laure’s face and the silence of her mother’s mouth, which Jess had captured in a photograph of the two of them, sitting at the table before two thin slices of bread, gripping their cigarettes as if keeping hold of their sanity.

What to do? The question haunted Jess on the long, dark road home as she used every bit of strength and judgment to make her way without a navigator, praying there would be no Germans on the road, no bombs, no 88s, no shells, no reason to have to leap out of the jeep and into a ditch and lie in the shadows alone. She reached the chateau late, tired, filthy, every muscle taut.

It was quiet, many of the rooms unlit, some of the men in the tents still moving about, but she could see that a light still shone brightly in Dan’s room, and in hers right at the top. She shook her head. Surely the men weren’t stealing more souvenirs? She might as well just empty her bag on the lawn and tell them to take what they wanted. She was too tired to fight anymore.

She climbed the stairs, cameras digging into her shoulders, stomach growling at eating nothing but a K-ration all day. The door to her room was ajar and she stopped short at the sight of Sparrow and Jennings and several others in her room. So they had come to take everything that was left.

But then she realized that Sparrow had a broom in his hand. Jennings was tucking clean sheets onto her bed, another GI was putting a tray of food down on the table she used as a desk. On the bed were all her uniforms, washed and pressed and folded with military precision. She rubbed her eyes.

The men saw her and stood stiffly to attention. “Captain May,” they said in unison.

“What are you doing?” she asked warily.