“Well,” Bel said, looking a little miffed. “My offer will stand. I’m proud of what you did over there. But you don’t have to do it any longer.”

Jess kissed Bel’s cheeks and walked out onto the street, to an assault of busses and cabs and horns and neon signs and intact buildings and people wearing colors other than khaki and carrying purses instead of weapons, unhelmeted, not a gas mask in sight, or a jeep, or a drop of blood.

And so, for the next two months, Jess tried. Yes, everybody had heard of her, yes they all thought that her skill behind the camera and her ability to put words together was outstanding. They would be happy to have her. Except…

Except that the male correspondents were coming back. And the men in the U.S. Armed Forces. Those men needed jobs more than she did, she was told, because they either did or would soon have a wife and children to support. She’d have someone to support her. She was a knockout! What man wouldn’t want to support her? Wink, wink. In fact, why didn’t they go out together and get a drink that very night?

“No, thank you,” Jess said. No thank you, no thank you, no thank you, over and over again.

In a city plastered with propaganda posters of red-lipsticked women in aprons cooking roast dinners, posters that exhorted women to lay down their tools and their pens and their minds and leave their jobs to the more deserving returned soldiers, Jess soon heard the news about Betty Wasson. Betty had been a CBS correspondent throughout the war and had returned, imagining she’d be employed by CBS in the States now that the war was over. They turned her down. And so Betty Wasson, who’d put together five broadcasts a day from Greece, who’d been wrongly detained as a spy and who’d kept her cool even under questioning from the Gestapo in Berlin, had returned to her pre-war job as an assistant to the food editor at women’s magazine McCall’s. Dorothy Thompson, former European bureau chief for the New York Post, was back writing fluff for Ladies’ Home Journal. What hope did Jess, a mere reporter for Vogue, have in finding serious work when women like this couldn’t get any?

Then she saw a piece in the New York Courier that said the brave and much-decorated Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Hallworth of the United States Army was returning to New York with his wife, Amelia. He would be taking up his position as Editor in Chief of the newspaper. And Jess, telling no one besides Martha what she planned to do, knew that she and the child she carried inside her had to get out of New York forever.

PART TEN

D’Arcy

Thirty

After she stepped away from her embrace with Jess, D’Arcy went upstairs and did a lot of thinking in her Buly-perfumed tub. A lot of doubting. And quite a lot of hoping.

She knew Jess wouldn’t answer a direct question. She’d made it clear that D’Arcy must ask Victorine. So, instead, the next morning, D’Arcy asked Célie to prepare another dinner in the folly and to deliver an invitation to Josh. She spent the entire day, her last at the chateau, tying up loose ends, terrified that he wouldn’t come.