D’Arcy put down her camera and let the silence suspend itself around them, knowing she would cut to the wide shot in the edit to take in the two of them sitting among the echo of Jess’s words, which spoke more powerfully than any narrative or voiceover would.

“What was the reaction to the article?” D’Arcy asked at last.

“Outrage, of course. But not for the girl being raped.” Jess’s voice was stark. “Everyone was outraged that I’d dared to report any such thing about our victorious and honorable army.”

“What you did, reporting this when you must have known what the reaction would be, was extraordinary.” It was extraordinary. Taking on a sacred institution like the army when victory was still so fresh in everyone’s minds in order to tell a truth that would not otherwise have been heard. A truth that must have been buried so deeply by the subsequent indignation that this was the first D’Arcy had seen of these photographs as part of Jessica’s body of work.

“What I did during the war was also cowardly,” Jess said tiredly. “It’s difficult to celebrate one without remembering the other.”

D’Arcy knew her meaning stretched deeper, into the void gouged out by D’Arcy’s visit to Paris. The defiance returned. “I think I’ve had enough of riddles.”

“Have you?” Jess trapped D’Arcy’s eyes in hers and D’Arcy blanched. No, she hadn’t. She wanted to stay on the safe ground of Jessica May, the photojournalist, and not dig into the personal. She hadn’t the resources of energy to deal with any more revelations right now.

“Which is your favorite picture from the war?” D’Arcy asked abruptly.

Jess gave out that same disarming smile and D’Arcy suddenly felt that she’d missed the point. There was something more within that article than D’Arcy had grasped, some reason why Jess had chosen it, of all the reports, to read.

“My favorite picture is that one, of course.” Jess indicated the wall behind her, on which hung Victorine Hallworth and Dan Hallworth. It wasn’t the ubiquitous image that IKEA and advertising agencies had desecrated but the other photograph D’Arcy had found in the archives in which the man was lifting the girl high into the air, the love between the two caught on their faces in touching relief to the vista of wounded men behind. “That one too.” Jess pointed to the picture on the dresser, the one in which she was about to fall into a kiss with Dan Hallworth. “I didn’t take it, though. But it turned out to be a prophecy—that those two people, for the rest of time, would have only the echo of that stopped kiss.”

Before D’Arcy could ask why, Jess turned the conversation. “You’ve been in Paris,” she said.

“I visited my moth—Victorine’s boarding school.”

“I see.” Jess stood up, moving across to the balcony railing, looking at the same tree that had caught D’Arcy’s attention earlier. “I didn’t mean for any of this to happen,” she said, as if apologizing to someone who wasn’t in the room.