“Can I ask you a question?” Jess said from the chair in which she’d been sitting, quite possibly watching the whole scene.

“I expect you will anyway,” D’Arcy replied with a half-smile.

Jess smiled too. “You’re right. Do you know Josh? Really know him? Because if you do, then you don’t need hope.”

“I do,” D’Arcy replied unthinking. “I really do,” she repeated, understanding at last the question.

She knew Josh’s past; she knew he was a good man. She knew that he respected her; he’d listened to her talk about her dreams and aspirations in a way nobody ever had. Most of all, she knew now that he wasn’t disappointed in her. Rather, she’d hurt him. Because he cared about her.

Everything she’d done since she’d arrived at the chateau ran in horrible slow-motion before her eyes. That she’d thought so much of herself and hardly ever about Josh. She may have bought him a scarf, but that was impulse rather than deliberate action. She had treated him like a distraction. She hadn’t told him her deepest hurts and secrets the way he’d trusted her with his.

He didn’t deserve her omissions. He deserved the gift of her trust, a gift he’d given her without hesitation. And Victorine deserved the same—for D’Arcy to have enough faith in her to allow her the chance to explain. To allow for the possibility of, as Jess had said, forgiveness.

Most of all, D’Arcy realized now, she cared for someone else besides her mother. She cared very much that she had hurt Josh. And her admiration for Jess as an artist had shifted; in working with Jess, in being taken into her confidence, D’Arcy now cared for Jess as a woman, as someone who had made mistakes and was hurting too.

D’Arcy stepped forward, without giving Jess any warning, and wrapped her arms around her, holding her. It took only a few seconds for Jess to sag into the embrace as if she’d been waiting for it for all her life.

And the strength of emotion in that embrace forced words to come together in D’Arcy’s mind, Jess’s words from earlier: She died in childbirth. Almost thirty years ago. The rest is for your mother to tell you.

D’Arcy was almost thirty years old. Victorine was not biologically D’Arcy’s mother. Was that why Jess had told D’Arcy the story—was D’Arcy actually Jess’s granddaughter?

PART NINE

Jess

War tears, rends. War rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins.

—Susan Sontag

And where do they go from here—the Servicewomen and all the others who, without the glamour of uniform, have queued and contrived and queued, and kept factories, homes and offices going? Their value is more than proven: their toughness where endurance was needed, their taciturnity when silence was demanded, their tact, good humor and public conscience;…how long before a grateful nation (or, anyhow, the men of the nation) forget what women accomplished when the country needed them? It is up to all women to see to it that there is no regression—that they go right on from here.