* * *

Jess drove straight to find Dan. “I’ve made everything worse. I didn’t mean to, and I know I can’t possibly really know how you feel but, talking to her, I felt so guilty and you must feel a thousand times worse and I just wanted to help—”

“Jess.” He put his hands on her shoulders and made her stop. The light was back in his eyes and he looked determined, almost back to the Dan she knew. “I can fix this. I feel better this morning. Plenty of jeeps use the road I took. I asked around. What happened was bad luck. So maybe I wouldn’t have taken you that way but I’ve been down that road before. And yes, I was in a hurry to see you but I was concentrating on the road and I was being vigilant, like always. I owe her, that’s for sure, but I don’t owe her marriage.”

Relief coursed through Jess. She didn’t know what she’d been thinking but Amelia’s arguments had seemed unassailable, as if there really was no option other than Amelia being alone for the rest of her life. Jess knew Amelia well enough to know that was not something Amelia would tolerate and nor, she supposed, did Amelia deserve that. Still, Dan’s last words haunted her. I owe her. They were so much like Amelia’s words.

But maybe it wasn’t true, Jess thought now. Maybe Amelia being out there wasn’t an accident. I don’t speak your filthy goddamn language, Amelia had screeched at the nurse.

Back at the press camp, she searched until she found Meg.

“Meg, you know you said a woman rang looking for Dan the other day?”

Meg looked momentarily puzzled, then nodded. “Yes.”

“Was she American?”

Meg snorted. “Hell no. She was as English as Henry the Eighth and just as snooty. Why?”

“No reason,” Jess said before she walked slowly away. Amelia had called the morning of the accident wanting to know where Dan would be that day. And lo and behold she’d turned up to the very same spot to translate German even though she didn’t speak the language.

If Amelia hadn’t lied to get herself to where Dan had been, none of this would have happened.

* * *

The whole next day ambled past without a word from Dan. When Jess found herself snapping at Martha, she took herself off in her jeep to Hitler’s apartment, thinking Dan would be in the command room. But Jennings said, concern smudging his freckles together, that Dan was ill and had been in his room all afternoon. Jennings was happy to smuggle her upstairs when she said she had something important to tell Dan, something that might help.

Dan didn’t answer her knock so she pushed the door open and found him sitting on the floor, back against the wall, eyes impossibly damp.

“What is it?” she cried, sinking to the floor, wrapping her arms around him and holding him to her.