She put her smile back on as she finished her turn about the room, but she still carried a knot in her stomach as she wondered what on earth she’d done, what rule she’d broken, to strike them all so dumb.

At the end she curtsied and summoned the other models over to take a bow, after which she expected they’d remove their ridiculous garb and change into their uniforms, but no one did. WACs and soldiers alike came over to examine each one, exclaiming over the chocolate wrappers, touching the ration boxes, commenting on Sparrow’s hairy legs protruding from his patriotic frock of flags.

Jess moved around the room until she found Dan. She looked up at him quizzically. “What the hell did I do this time? My skirt definitely wasn’t tucked into my underwear so it can’t have been that.”

Dan shook his head. “No. It was just…”

He paused as if he really didn’t want to tell her and she almost shook her head and said, Don’t bother, not wanting this night to be ruined by hearing of some other wickedness wrongly attributed to her. He looked away as he spoke and Jess stared at the ground.

“I don’t think anyone realized what had been right under our noses for so long,” Dan said eventually. “You looked…stunning. As if you’d arrived from another world. A bewitching stranger. Someone more than worth fighting for.”

She dragged her eyes away from the floor to gape at him, speechless, until he continued.

“And then you opened your mouth and spoke to us just like Jess would,” Dan grinned, “and we remembered that behind the apparition was someone we knew. Someone we’re all glad to have here with us. Cheers.” He raised his glass and clinked it against hers, then moved away to clap Sparrow on the back, leaving Jess to recover her power of speech, to be reminded by Jennings that she was supposed to be taking photographs, to wonder why on earth Dan’s words—you looked stunning—had unsettled her so much.

Once she’d snapped as many pictures as film allowed, the gramophone was put to full use, nobody caring that the dusty collection of records wasn’t exactly up to jazz club standards.

For more than an hour she whirled around the ballroom floor with one or another of the men, surprised at how light she felt, the heaviness of war momentarily lifted by the glee in the room. It had become abnormal, she realized, for so many people to be so outwardly happy and that in itself was a reminder that they were all, every one of them, clinging to a kind of amnesia for as long as they could hold off the dawn and re-mobilization.

At the end of every song, her partner changed, and each man ceded way graciously to the next—no arguing, no jealousy, no jeers—until she saw Dan tap her partner on the shoulder and say to her, “Surely it’s my turn now.”

She smiled. “I think it must be.”