Then Jess began to speak, telling D’Arcy how she’d met Dan on a battlefield in Italy, about Victorine’s tumultuous early years, about the fact that Victorine was nobody’s child and so she had become Dan’s and, for a short time, Jess’s.

Nobody’s child. Just like D’Arcy was right now. “Why just a short time?” she asked.

A knock on the door made D’Arcy jump. She stood up when Josh appeared.

“Sorry,” he said, the surprise visible on his face when he saw D’Arcy. “I can come back later. I have some papers for you to sign,” he said to Jess.

But, rather than repeating her question, D’Arcy was already slipping past Josh and out the door. Which made her the coward, she knew.

* * *

That night, D’Arcy sat in her room and, after waiting hours for it to load onto her computer, she watched the footage she’d recorded earlier. She didn’t edit it or cut it or adjust the sound or the brightness. Her hand hovered, uncertain, over the mouse, wanting to craft a film in the cinéma vérité style, to be unbiased, to let whatever truth Jess was moving toward gently and expressively declare itself on the screen. D’Arcy’s impulse to be unscripted, to have no questions prepared, to simply converse, had been the right one, she saw. Otherwise she would only be fighting against the story that wanted to tell itself, trying to impose a narrative on what was, she suspected, unnarratable.

She rubbed her hand tiredly on her forehead. What was she thinking? That she, an amateur, could make any kind of film about Jess, let alone one that aimed for truth. Her postmodern arty friends would all be rolling their eyes at her, telling her to forget it; that whatever Jess had to say wasn’t truth, merely her own agenda. That D’Arcy was being naive, or manipulated into believing that there was something to be revealed when there was only a whimsical old woman who’d chosen to hide her identity for reasons that belonged in the past.

D’Arcy stretched, letting the film play across her computer screen, and walked out onto the balcony, the cooler night air and the ever-present scent of the garden like a calm hand placed on her shoulders, loosening them, easing the stiffness in her neck.

What I did during the war was also cowardly. Jess’s voice cut into the night and D’Arcy once again felt the certainty that she herself was the coward. Too afraid to do anything with the footage she’d recorded. Too afraid to have written a proper proposal to the Jessica May foundation. Too afraid to talk to Josh. Too afraid to speak to Victorine.

But fear was not a word D’Arcy had ever associated with herself. She was bold, adventuring around the world, unshrinking when it came to asking for what she wanted both from her work and the men she amused herself with.

She turned around, marched over to the desk, sat down in the chair and fixed her hand on her mouse. She might never be able to make herself talk to Josh; he would want her to confide in him, like he had done with her, but even thinking about what she’d discovered at the school hurt so much that she couldn’t imagine talking about it, ever. And there was only a vacancy, an emptiness before her when she contemplated telling Victorine what she’d discovered. So yes, she was fearful. In that, but not in everything. She would make this film.