Then there was a private in a coat made of bandages donated by the nurses, a shirt fashioned from camouflage netting, a hysterical hat made from ration boxes, and a handful of other outfits that the men had helped her to make with good humor. The merriment sewn into each costume was made manifest in the room and she could see that everyone had actually forgotten, for a moment, why they were all there. Her eyes, roaming the happy faces, caught Dan’s and he smiled and gave her a thumbs-up.

She slipped back into the scullery and changed into her own gown; she’d stitched together whatever fragments of fabric she could find from ripped or threadbare or no longer usable U.S. Army shirts and trousers and coats and jackets and made a patchwork of a khaki dress. But the dress was as close as her sewing skills would allow it to be to the one she wore in the photograph from Vogue that many of the men had pinned over their beds: the floor-sweeping Lelong princess gown with a full skirt, the bodice that left her back bare, her neck long, her arms fluid by her sides.

She’d washed her hair that day and now she brushed it to shining, not minding that it was cut shorter than ever, realizing that she looked all the better for it, the features of her face—her dark brown eyes, her full lips, her strong cheekbones—accentuated, and she was startled for a moment into thinking that somebody else had stepped up to the mirror: the Jessica May of two years before who’d never looked anything other than nonpareil, a stark contrast to the often filthy woman in combat trousers she’d become.

She brushed powder over her face, swept mascara onto her lashes, rouged her cheeks and outlined her lips in red, then took her turn to parade through the ballroom as the finale of the show.

She expected hooting and cheers, she expected laughter as they realized she’d turned a picture of herself, a picture that so many of them revered, into a caricature. Instead what greeted her was silence. Only the gramophone played on, a ridiculously melodramatic turn-of-the-century operetta screeching into the room. But not a sound escaped from any of the men as she strolled in, her body easy and relaxed as it swung into the model’s walk that came back to her as naturally as breathing, as she strode to the center of the room, one hand on her hip, eyes sweeping the silent faces. Her smile, which had been bright and full, faded, then fell as she waited for something, anything that would rescue her from this awful silence.

After a very long moment, she put both hands on her hips. “What?” she demanded. “Is the back of my skirt tucked into my underwear or something equally jaw-dropping?”

Then the burst of laughter she’d been expecting rushed through the room and the cheers began, the clapping and roaring reaching a peak so great that Jess wondered if the applause could be heard all the way over in Germany.