“And you don’t think about it now? Don’t revel in running your hands over his naked flesh? Don’t glance at him and catch your breath because he’s so handsome? You were a model. You’ve traded on your looks and your body for years. Don’t pretend it doesn’t matter. Don’t try to make out like I’m the unprincipled one. All’s fair in love and war, didn’t you know?” Amelia’s eyes, between the bandages on her face, glared at Jess, a frosty, implacable blue.

Jess sat down. “Wouldn’t you rather marry someone you loved?” she asked gently. “Someone who loved you?”

Amelia cut her off. “Under the bandages, I now have a face only a mother could love. And you know as well as I do how much my mother loved me. Which means I have no one. So don’t you sit there, secure in the knowledge that you’ve landed a handsome and wealthy man, and tell me to wait for love. I don’t care about love. I never have. My parents cured me of that. I want my freedom.”

Amelia’s voice lowered but it struck Jess harder than the forceful tone of a moment before. “Marriage to the admiral gave me that freedom,” Amelia went on. “He was away at sea and I had a house, parties, friends, fun. All for the bargain price of sex once in a blue moon and escort services at occasional dinners. As a single woman, I have no freedom. Nowhere to live, no money. Because I was childless, my husband’s home and belongings have passed to his brother. But I also know that I won’t have any freedom by marrying a man besotted with me.”

So Jess said it, hoping that because she wasn’t saying it directly to Dan, it wouldn’t have the consequences they’d feared. “I love Dan. He loves me. What he and I have isn’t a fleeing wartime romance. It’s forever.”

“Hasn’t everything you’ve seen over the past two years shown you that there is no forever? I learned that in boarding school—that even a daughter isn’t forever. That’s why there are boarding schools and husbands.”

For the first time, Jess felt how deeply Amelia’s parents’ abandonment of her at a Parisian boarding school in order to avoid the heavy lifting of caring for a child had hurt her. When they were fifteen, Jess and Amelia had turned the fact that their parents weren’t concerned about them in the same way that most other parents seemed to be for their children into an amusing game: a competition to see whose parents would do the most neglectful thing that month. Amelia usually won.

“I don’t believe in love,” Amelia reiterated. “I’ve made my choice. Dan owes me.”

Jess stood up and whirled around, needing to leave. She crashed into a nurse, who said “Pardon me” in German.

The last thing Jess heard was Amelia shouting at the nurse, “I don’t speak your filthy goddamn language so don’t use it in front of me!”