“I had my first gin when I was fifteen,” Jess said to Bel, inhaling smoke deep into her lungs. “My first kiss that same night, and you could say that I quenched my curiosity of all things sexual by the time I was seventeen. My parents were either oblivious or had a different moral compass to most—I’ve never been sure—although I’m fairly certain my mother wasn’t faithful to my father.”

“Which the War Department was only too happy to confirm,” Bel said slowly, piecing together the story of what had happened that morning.

Jess nodded. “They listed the names of men my mother had had affairs with. And they listed the names of men I was suspected of sleeping with. They were trying to establish a pattern, they said. A pattern of licentiousness that would preclude me from ever being let loose among an army of men. Of course, their list of my paramours was long and hugely exaggerated.”

“So you’re not going?”

“I don’t know. I told them…” She hesitated, wondering now how she’d ever had the bravado to retaliate when all she’d wanted to do was cry, because the irony of it all was that Jess might have lived openly with a man for three years but it was only one man; she would never cheat on anyone, no matter what the War Department thought.

“I hope you said something typically Jessica May and left their filthy mouths hanging open.” Bel reached across the table for Jess’s hand.

Something typically Jessica May. It was the first time, sitting in the War Department offices, that she’d ever wanted to be anything other than typically Jessica May. But why should she change for a group of condescending men?

“I said,” Jess stood, hand theatrically on hip, “ ‘My, my, it’s a wonder I have any energy left to apply to be a correspondent. Do you provide the men who apply with a list of their conquests? Or is that something you all drink to at the bar later? Perhaps I might write about this screening process for Vogue, seeing as how I apparently don’t have a reputation left to lose.’ ”

Bel laughed. “Bravo!”

Jess walked over to the stove to stir the soup. Of course she’d been dismissed after that, her threat hanging in the air like cheap perfume, tawdry but essential; if she capitulated, then how would she ever survive in the European Theater of Operations?

“Sometimes I feel like I’m always saying goodbye,” Jess said suddenly, back turned to Bel. “It’s one of the things I remember about growing up. That I had to be funny and fabulous so I’d make friends and then, once I’d made the friends, we’d leave. Even when I was at boarding school in Paris, my parents would pull me out every few weeks when they needed photographs taken. Then I’d come back and, even though it was the same school, it was like starting again.”

Starting again. Which was what she’d be doing now if she was ever accredited by the War Department.