She buried her face in her hands and rubbed her forehead. She was so bloody selfish. Her mother had always been enough, just as she’d told Josh. She didn’t need a grandfather. And what if Dan Hallworth wasn’t the ideal clichéd grandfather: soft and warm and endearingly gray-haired and always losing his glasses. There had to be a reason why Victorine had disowned him.

D’Arcy’s hand betrayed her. It crept back to the folder and sifted through the papers. There were several letters from Dan Hallworth to the school, confirming Victorine’s placement there in 1944. There was a list of approved visitors for the child, which comprised a few soldiers—privates Sparrow and Jennings—and the name of one woman: Jessica May. But nowhere was there any correspondence from Victorine’s mother, nor any mention that Jessica May was the mother.

D’Arcy opened the next folder with a feeling of trepidation. It bore dates later than the first, and would account for Victorine from age ten to sixteen. But there were only copies of school reports, plus more correspondence from Dan Hallworth, this time typed on a letterhead for the New York Courier and then World Media Group.

Then one final, catastrophic letter. It looked benign, black letters on white, correspondence from a Parisian hospital. Victorine had had an appendectomy when she was sixteen. D’Arcy almost didn’t bother to read past the opening paragraph because what could a record of an operation tell her about her mother?

But the letter said that the child had not complained about the pain in her stomach for several days and that, by the time the pain became so acute it couldn’t help but be noticed, Victorine’s appendix had perforated, sending infection out into her body. She’d been deathly ill in hospital for weeks, had undergone several operations to clean up the mess, had multiple abscesses from the infection.

It was the penultimate paragraph, before the polite closing, that D’Arcy wished never to have read. It said that the scarring from the subsequent infections had blocked Victorine Hallworth’s fallopian tubes so badly that she would be unable to bear children.

Unable to bear children. D’Arcy stood up, the words shuttering before her every time she blinked, like a relentless slideshow. She stared at the wall, eyes stretched open but she saw the words flash there too, filmic and devastating in their scope, casting everything that she had thought to be true into the black and stygian realms of falsehood.

PART FIVE

Jess

When I looked at those photographs, something broke. Some limit had been reached, and not only that of horror; I felt irrevocably grieved, wounded, but a part of my feeling started to tighten; something went dead; something is still crying.

—Susan Sontag

Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.

—H. L. Mencken

Nineteen

BELGIUM, JANUARY 1945

As Jess drove into Bastogne with Martha, they passed tanks that had been torn apart, jeeps pulverized into the ground, and trucks dragging trailers with neat stacks of dead bodies that looked, from a distance, like firewood. The siege of Bastogne had lasted for a week and, from what Jess could glean, the siege meant that Dan’s division had been encircled and ceaselessly bombed and shelled and shot at by the Germans, who had four times the number of soldiers. It meant that the men, against all the odds and sustained only by prayers and a stubborn implacableness of spirit, fought their way out and the Germans fell back, and Bastogne, a stew of blood and bodies, surrounded by snow stained pink with the life-force of Americans and Germans alike, was back in Allied hands and the press were allowed to return.