She continued. “There’s just one girl, Amelia—she was English—who I still write to. Her parents had left her at school when she was seven and she’d only seen them twice in nine years. We bonded over a certain kind of parental ignorance, although our parents were nothing alike. Her father was in the army and always away somewhere. My father had the social skills of a mollusk, so my mother thought that taking me to all their parties would teach me both how to look after myself and how to win people over.”

“Did it work?” Bel asked with a trace of irony.

“I won you over, didn’t I?” Jess teased, facing her friend and pushing the past back down to where it belonged.

She ladled soup into bowls and pushed a pile of clippings across the table toward Bel. “Martha told me to read these. Ruth Cowan and Inez Robb got themselves assigned to the WACs—the Women’s Army Corps—in North Africa and they’ve been reporting from there. About what it’s like to have to wear trousers instead of skirts and the trials of only going to the hair salon every few months. In this one,” Jess pointed to a page, “Cowan even says she’d prefer to have a bomb fall on her than share a ditch with a spider. I wonder if any of those things cross the minds of the soldiers out there? Every one of their by-lines carries the words ‘Girl Reporter.’ If you put that on any of my pieces I’ll never speak to you again.”

“What are they going to do with you if you do get yourself over there?” Bel said, shaking her head and starting to laugh. “I’d hate to be the first man to try calling you a girl reporter. Don’t forget you’re probably subject to military law so you might have to eat your words occasionally. Although I can’t imagine how a woman who had her first kiss at age fifteen will tolerate censorship.”

“My plan is not to kiss anybody while I’m away,” Jess informed her primly. “If I do, then I just reinforce every suspicion they already have about me. I’m sure they’re itching for me to seduce an entire division of the U.S. Army. I’m not planning to give them the satisfaction.”

“Sounds like you won’t be having any satisfaction while you’re away, then.” Bel grinned, and that did it.

Jess felt her eyes tear up and her throat tighten. “I think Emile has cured me of wanting that kind of satisfaction for a good while.”

“I wanted to make you laugh,” Bel said. “Don’t cry. The formidable Jessica May does not cry. Even when our art director excoriated you in front of a whole team of graphic designers for framing a picture with too much surrealist ambition, I never saw you cry.”

Jess gave a small laugh and wiped her eyes, hoping to wipe away all thoughts of Emile. “I’d forgotten about that,” she said to Bel. “That was the day you told me you were going to run my first piece. We went and drank too much champagne at the Stork Club afterward.”