* * *

Dan was at the breakfast table early as usual, having slunk out without waking Victorine, or so he’d thought until she appeared not ten minutes later, clutching the newspaper he’d found in her bed last night, the newspaper with the pictures from his new correspondent on the front cover.

Victorine’s eyes were round and serious as she turned them on Dan. “You saw Maman,” she said inexplicably.

Walter eyed Dan over his eggs.

Dan ignored his father and spoke to Victorine. “I haven’t seen Jess,” he said, picking up his hat even though he hadn’t eaten anything.

“But she took these.” Victorine pointed to the photographs in the newspaper.

“A man called Monsieur Durant took them,” Dan said.

Victorine frowned at Dan as if she was disappointed in him. “I’m not hungry,” she announced, slipping out of the room.

“She sure is a funny kid,” Walter said, studying Dan, who set his face into the most inscrutable expression he could muster. “But do you know what I think?”

Dan didn’t respond, which didn’t prevent Walter from continuing. “That whoever this Jess is, it’d be best if Victorine stopped mentioning her. A child can only have one mother.” Walter wiped his mouth on his napkin and threw it onto the table.

I’d have to cut out her heart to stop her from talking about Jess, Dan wanted to shout. Instead he turned on his heel and strode out the door.

* * *

That afternoon, another story came in. And more pictures.

As Dan studied them, he could see, now that Victorine had lifted the blindfold, that the pictures were taken either by Jess or a very skilled copycat. One was solarized perfectly, a technique that so few photojournalists would bother with, but which had always been one of Jess’s trademarks. He read over the article and now he knew why yesterday’s had punched him so hard in the gut: her phrasing was everywhere, the whisper of her voice in his ear as he read.

And so it went on, every day. Each time he went out for a quick drink at the bar down the road where newspapermen congregated, he was asked about his new correspondent. Everyone assumed the mysterious stringer was a man. Nobody suspected it was Jess.

Someone I met in the army, Dan would answer, and the person he was talking to would groan and slap him on the back and curse Dan’s good fortune: to have survived the war unscathed, and to have unearthed a photojournalist from the rubble of that war who had lifted the bar so high, the rest of them could do nothing but walk underneath it.

He spent a week wound tight with fury, that she would reach out to him like this, professionally but not personally. Still, he read each dispatch from her as it came in, searching for a message, a clue, but he found nothing. And so he said nothing. Did nothing. Until he heard himself shouting at his editors in the morning meeting and realized that, even under intense fire from the Germans, he’d never shouted at his men before.