“Any of what?”

“I’m winging it again.” Jess turned back to D’Arcy. “I only wanted to look at you. To know you, for just one brief snapshot in your life. I never expected you to know so much about war photography, and thus about me, couldn’t believe there was anyone still alive who cared about Jessica May and now…” Her voice shook, and trailed off, and D’Arcy’s stomach heaved. Jess looked terrified, which terrified D’Arcy in turn. What had happened?

“Dan Hallworth was the love of my life,” Jess finally said. “He published the article about the rapes, which was an act of bravery in itself. I sent it to him, not really expecting he would. But he was always, above and beyond everything else, a man who did the right thing, no matter how hard, no matter the fallout. I’ve tried to learn that from him but I’m not sure I’ve succeeded.”

D’Arcy stared at the picture on the wall. Only someone who cared very deeply would take such a photo. It was a devotion apparent in each of Jess’s photographs; it was what lifted them above the work of others and why they resonated with so many people, which was what she’d argued with Josh the first day she arrived at the chateau, eager to prove that the photographer was a woman. But what she apprehended now was that the quality of empathy she’d always admired could only have been caught by someone who knew suffering. Unbidden, Dorothea Lange’s insistence that every photograph should become a self-portrait came to mind and D’Arcy wondered what she might discover about Jess if she were to re-see each photograph with that in mind, or what she might discover about herself if she were to watch the footage she was now recording, choosing to focus on herself rather than Jess.

“What happened?” D’Arcy asked tremulously, because she was becoming more certain that the past of everyone—Jess, Victorine, perhaps Dan Hallworth, and maybe even, unknown to her, D’Arcy—had been ruined somehow by acts for which they were partially responsible, but which had also happened regardless of what they had wished for instead. Words she had read not long ago suddenly scrolled across her mind: “the landscape of devastation is still a landscape. There is beauty in ruins.” At the time, her academic brain had nodded but now she understood. Something had ruined Jess, but here she was, still alive. Perhaps pathos made you grasp the wonder of endurance, that you could suffer all things but the spirit still held on. First, though, you had to look that suffering in the eye, be the spectator rather than the coward who turned away, unable to watch. Which was D’Arcy?

“I can only tell you part of it,” Jess said thinly. “You need to…” Again that pause, that haunted expression. “You need to ask your mother about the rest.”

Your mother. Did that mean Jess didn’t know what D’Arcy had discovered in Paris? Why then the subtle apology when D’Arcy told her she’d visited Victorine’s school?