“Are you okay, ma’am?” one of the nearby soldiers asked.

She shook her head. “What’s his name?” She pointed in the direction of the officer’s jeep.

“That’s Major Thompson.”

Major Thompson. The same man who’d thrown away the note Dan had given him about his soldiers helping themselves to what they thought they had a right to. She jumped into her own jeep and tore off after him, arriving in time to see the soldier, not looking at all chastised, hopping into the car with the major and pulling away without a backward glance.

Martha appeared, cursing. “They won’t do a damn thing to him. Meanwhile that poor woman…”

That poor woman. Who could be pregnant, injured, mentally ruined by a man with a gun and the terrible power conferred on him by victory.

“What does it make us if we don’t write about it?” Jess asked in a whisper.

“Smart,” Martha said firmly. “Damn smart.”

* * *

“I need a drink,” Martha said when they arrived back at the press camp.

“I do too,” Jess said feelingly, hating herself for it. As if a drink would ever make that woman feel better. Jess had the power—not of justice, but of revelation—in her hands and she wasn’t using it. She was blaming Warren Stone and the censors and everyone but herself. “I’m supposed to be meeting Dan though. Will you be okay?” she asked, squeezing her friend’s hand.

“I’ll find Lee and a bottle of whiskey and I won’t remember any of it. Until tomorrow.” Martha grimaced.

“I’ll stay with you.”

“No. Go enjoy the one good thing there is. And don’t you dare feel guilty about it.” Martha embraced Jess, which she supposed was Martha’s way of telling Jess she knew what was going on with Dan and Jess blinked, hard.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

On her way out, Meg, the WAC coming off telephone duty, jumped up. “Say, are you going into town? I need a ride.”

“Sure,” Jess said. “I’m having a drink with Dan—Lieutenant Colonel Hallworth.” She tried to lighten her own mood by adding, “I can’t quite believe it’s possible to do something so normal in Munich.”

Meg laughed. “I’m meeting someone as well. Who knows, maybe we’ll all go back to dating sometime soon rather than…” Her voice broke off as she searched for the right words to describe the way relationships developed in the cut and thrust of war.

As they climbed into the jeep, Meg said, “Lieutenant Colonel Hallworth sure is popular. Someone else called looking for him earlier. I told her she should join the queue behind you but she didn’t see the joke. She was very insistent about finding him so I put her through to HQ and told her this was a press camp, not a command post. Sorry,” Meg said, genuinely contrite when she caught Jess’s stare. “I didn’t mean anything…”

“It’s fine,” Jess said, pulling the jeep onto the road. Everyone seemed to know that she and Dan were some kind of item. Maybe that was okay. It took the power away from Warren; his revelation about Jess and Dan would be very anti-climactic if it was already accepted rumor. Maybe that was why he hadn’t said anything, why he’d left her alone lately. He’d run out of ammunition at last.