Jess smiled. “Dan, you’re a leader like I’ve hardly seen anywhere in Europe. Your men will do anything for you. Your battalion has one of the lowest mortality rates, not because you haven’t seen danger—you’ve seen more than most—but because of you. If the way you are here is the way you are in New York, then I doubt that anyone would ever think of you only as the boss’s son.”

He kissed her and she sighed theatrically. “So you’ll be Editor in Chief of the New York Courier when we return to America and I’ll be…what? Vogue won’t need war reports once there isn’t a war.”

“Jess, your photographs are famous. Anybody would want to work with you. I want to work with you. And be with you. Always. In fact…” He paused and studied her, as if unsure whether to continue. “I don’t have a ring or an extravagant dinner or anything else to persuade you, and I need to let you know that as Victorine’s guardian, she’s my responsibility and it’s one I intend to honor, and it’s probably not the way you might want it to be but, Jessica May, when we get back to New York, will you marry me?”

Jess froze, her body and her mind aching to just shout Yes, of course I’ll marry you! But her caution and her awareness that being so close to the end of the war was not the time to die made her pause. “What if, by saying yes…” Her voice trailed off.

“It won’t happen. Not now. We’re safe. I promise.”

I promise. She believed him. There wasn’t a thing in the world he could say that she wouldn’t believe. So she smiled. “If you’re brave enough to ask, then I should be brave enough to say yes. A thousand times yes.”

PART SIX

D’Arcy

Twenty-three

For the entirety of the train ride back to Reims from Paris, D’Arcy felt herself sucking in air; her lungs wouldn’t function and a thing she’d done for years without thought—breathing—became suddenly impossible. She struggled off the train and onto the platform, barely able to comprehend how she might get a taxi, when she saw Josh waiting for her.

All she wanted was to rush over to him and rest her head against his chest and have him hold her. But if she did that she would cry—again. The last thing he’d want was the art handler looking after his client’s most precious works falling to pieces.

Which she was, like a negative never placed in a stop bath, overdeveloped, all the light blown out. Ever since she’d read the letter from the hospital, she had felt sobs rising from somewhere buried so deep inside her that she hadn’t really known it was there—a place she’d hidden from her own self because there was nothing, she’d thought, that could be done about it. Everyone else had families, hordes of people who loved them unconditionally. D’Arcy had only ever had Victorine.