Jess leaned into the car to kiss Victorine, darling child, whose eyes were soft-shuttered with sleep.

Then she followed Warren to the tree. She tried to hold back the tears but she couldn’t and Warren reached up to wipe them away, thumbs pressing into her cheekbones. It was the worst thing of all. That he could take a gesture of kindness and turn it into something vicious made the first sob escape. He smiled.

And so she wept as she let him kiss her and unbutton her blouse and lift up her skirt and take what he wanted from her. He groaned loudly as he moved roughly into her, breathing hard as if it was a pleasurable moment, a wanted moment, a moment to cherish.

Jess closed her eyes. And still she wept.

When Warren was done he sagged against her, face pressed into her neck. Jess opened her eyes at last to see a five-year-old child standing sleepily before them, having parted the low-hanging branches that Jess had thought would conceal forever what had just happened. Instead, Victorine stared in confusion at the sight of a man’s body pressed close to Jess, at Jess’s skirt lifted far higher than it should be, at the tears on Jess’s face.

“Victorine,” Jess gasped, pushing Warren off her.

He stumbled backward, hands fumbling with his trouser buttons and Jess caught sight of his face. The expression he wore was not one of gloating, roistering victory as she’d expected. But something else.

He reached out a hand for her and Jess recoiled, thinking he was going to hit her now, not content with the physical violence he’d so far inflicted. But he touched her hair instead, almost tenderly, and said, puzzled, “It wasn’t what I thought it would be.”

Jess backed away, tucking Victorine behind her, outrage unleashed at last—that he would think the only abomination in what had just happened was his disappointment.

“Did you really believe I would fall in love with you just because you kissed me? Just because you did…that?” Her voice was as deadly quiet as a sniper tiptoeing through a defeated village, and colder than the bitter winter of the Ardennes. She could not yell or scream; her anger was so ferocious it was almost beyond her control. “I loved Dan a long time before I ever kissed him,” she hissed. “There is a very big difference between this…” She shifted her eyes contemptuously to his unbuttoned fly. “And love.”

She turned from Warren, picked up Victorine and carried her back to the car, the child’s sweet soapy smell pressed into her neck where Warren’s mouth had been only moments before. She prayed to God it was too dark for Victorine to have seen very much. That she was too young to comprehend, least of all to commit to memory, what she had witnessed.

The most appalling part of the whole appalling evening was that, in an abhorrent way, Jess had won. Warren had got what he’d obviously long wanted but had found that the way he’d obtained it had made it not to his liking. A bathetic end to the game for him and a victory for Jess as hollow as any in Europe that had cost millions of lives.