—Audrey Withers, British Vogue, 1945

Twenty-eight

FRANCE, MAY 1945

After Dan said those words—I love you—Jess left for Paris. She sent him a note, trying to explain the unexplainable. That she couldn’t let him face a court-martial, couldn’t let the leaderless men in his battalion die in Europe or in the Pacific, governed by a man like Major Thompson, just so that he could marry her. She gave him her blessing to marry Amelia in order to keep his men safe. She told him he had to do the right thing. She ended the note by saying:

Remember how I once said that I didn’t want to live if I knew that you had died? So I want your word that you will look after yourself. But I also don’t want to live in the knowledge that you are heartbroken. One day, this will fade. You once told me that everything does. Why should this be any different?

A stupid tear dropped onto the notepaper as she wrote the last words, smudging the letters, betraying the fact that, while she might have written them, she did not for one minute believe them. It would never fade.

And she held on to the thought that, perhaps if she just absented herself, while Amelia might marry Dan, the marriage wouldn’t last. Dan and Amelia would be married just long enough to save Dan. Despite her scars and her arm, Amelia would find her feet; she always did. Then a divorce could be arranged, leaving Dan and Jess free to be together.

* * *

“Jessica May. What a pleasure.” Warren Stone’s smirking face greeted her as she pulled into the Hotel Scribe. “I heard you were coming. And just when I’m in Paris too.”

“How the hell did you hear that?” Jess hauled her bags over her shoulder and marched up the steps.

Warren followed her. “Correspondents love to gossip. I was on a call to the PRO in Munich yesterday and he filled me in on all the hot topics of conversation there.”

“Like the war?” Jess glowered. “Isn’t that hot enough for any of you?”

“All work and no play would make us a dull lot, as the saying goes. We have to take our amusements when we can. Which it seems you were more than willing to do with one Lieutenant Colonel Hallworth. Until he threw you over for an English girl. And you’ve come here to mend your broken heart.”

“Excuse me.” Jess stalked off to the elevator before she lost all of her dignity by crying in front of Warren Stone.

Her plan was to stay one night in Paris. Surely she could avoid Warren for one night? She’d spend tomorrow saying farewell to Victorine and then she’d get herself back to London, and on to New York. Easy.

And she wouldn’t think about Dan. Which was the hardest thing of all.

She left early in the morning to collect Victorine, only to discover that her jeep was missing. The PRO told her that Warren Stone had borrowed it, leaving a message that Jess should take his instead.