“It is not my goal to allow women into a war zone.” The woman said it matter-of-factly, politely even. But her words were a boot pushing down on the back of Jess’s neck, telling her that she should stay where she was, doing what she was doing; that being a clothes hanger with a nice smile was the right job for her.

Jess matched the woman’s pragmatic tone of voice. “I speak German. Not fluently, but certainly well enough to make myself understood, and to understand what’s being said. I also speak Italian. I wonder if you can tell me the names of any men you’ve given passports to in order to report the war who can speak French, German and Italian?”

The woman didn’t shift her gaze. “I cannot,” she said.

And there it was, a tiny advantage, but an advantage nonetheless.

The woman finally let go of Jess’s eyes. “I will inform your editor at Vogue of my decision. It will take some time.”

She’d been dismissed. She’d either given it her best shot or her worst; it was hard to tell. If this didn’t work, she’d be back in a field, if she was lucky, or on a beach, or outside a steel-gray skyscraper wearing next season’s clothes, smiling as if she were happy, as unremarkable as a Jurassic fern leaf imprinted into volcanic rock by the years and then long forgotten.

* * *

Two months later she got her passport. The year was marching on and Jess had achieved nothing except to substantially reduce her savings, living off house model work for companies like Stella Designs. It was lucky she had her parents’ apartment and didn’t have to pay rent.

Then she had to be screened by the War Department’s Bureau of Public Relations Overseas Liaison Branch, who had the power to accredit her as a correspondent. Or not. Just getting the appointment took another month. And if she’d thought her parents were particularly skilled at uncovering secrets that the earth tried to hold on to, nothing prepared Jess for the rigor of the War Department. Martha had forewarned her. “By the time they’ve finished with you, you’ll feel like you’re sitting in front of them in your underwear.”

Which she did. They showed her a photograph of her mother; Jess couldn’t imagine how they’d got hold of it but, that night, when she returned to her apartment and looked through her boxes, it wasn’t in her photo album, which only proved that Emile was more of a bastard than she’d realized.

Just as she’d done the day she and Emile stepped off their ship in New York City to be greeted by the news of her parents’ death, Jess sat on the floor of the Greenwich Village apartment, weeping. Back then, she’d been watched over by the angelic forms of dust sheets and the brooding presence of Emile, standing in the doorway, not knowing what to do. Now she was alone. She hadn’t wept for such a long time. But seeing the photograph of her mother, knowing that she and her father and botany had never been enough for her, if what the War Department had said was true, brought back the grief.