So D’Arcy levered Jess down onto the bank of the canal under the trees. The older woman slipped off her shoes and dangled her feet in the water. It looked like such a good idea that D’Arcy did it too. For a moment, she could see them there as if through a camera: a younger woman and an older one, backdropped by a striking tree, in paradise, but neither of them truly happy. The weight of secrets and the past lay around them like the shell-torn debris of war, secrets and a past that were now being handed on to D’Arcy.

D’Arcy stared at the water. As far as she knew, it hadn’t mattered how much Dan had loved Jess; the marriage had never taken place. And D’Arcy wasn’t sure that, right now, she could face the end of this particular story if they were indeed marching straight on into heartbreak. “Do you want to see the film?” she asked Jess suddenly.

Jess hesitated and D’Arcy felt her cheeks flush. Why would Jess want to see D’Arcy’s efforts? Jess had photographed wars. Been published in Vogue. Had left a legacy. D’Arcy had made crates for artworks and had fashioned for herself a barren kind of life. Like Victorine’s.

“Anyone else’s film of me I could look at,” Jess said at last. “But yours will be too honest for me, I fear.”

Jess began to stand and, somehow, as if he had a telepathic connection to Jess’s needs, Josh appeared, ready to help her back to the house.

D’Arcy couldn’t look at him. Instead, she stayed by the canal, feet wet, turning Jess’s words over in her mind. Had she meant it as a compliment? And how did she know that, in choosing the cinéma vérité style, what D’Arcy had been searching for was honesty. Honesty of a kind Victorine had never seen fit to grant her. D’Arcy felt the boughs of the tree brush lightly against her back and she felt the untold stories, stories of which Jess, and perhaps now D’Arcy, were the custodians, begin to stir.

Inexplicably, Josh returned to the canal.

“I wanted to apologize,” he said, standing beside another of the crazy beech trees, the one that looked like a girl holding out her skirt of leaves, just as D’Arcy had done when she crossed the drawbridge that very first day, ready to dance away, laughing, before anybody could catch her.

“What for?” she asked warily. An apology from Josh was the last thing she expected.

“I promised you a chaste massage and it ended up being anything but. So I’m sorry. I know you have a lot on your mind and that you don’t want to tell me about it and the last thing you need is me pushing myself on you. So I want you to know that I’ll leave you in peace from now on.”

Please don’t. But he’d gone before D’Arcy could say the words.

* * *

That night, D’Arcy asked Jess for the permission she’d been too afraid to seek before now. Jess granted it. Then D’Arcy rang the gallery and told them what she knew: that Jessica May was the photographer, that they should expand the exhibition to include her war photography, and that D’Arcy was making a documentary about Jess. At the end, she made herself say, “I think you should include the documentary in the exhibition. Otherwise it won’t feel complete.”