Dan couldn’t help but stare at the cliché before him. The returned soldier who couldn’t separate himself from everything he’d seen and who drank himself into oblivion because real life had become more terrifying than running into the maws of the Germans. “You’re wallowing,” Dan said sharply. “I never thought you’d be the one to turn out like this.”

Jennings laughed bitterly. “And how many of your men have you seen since you’ve been back, Sir? None, I’ll wager. I bet all you’ve done is avert your eyes from the ones like me weaving drunkenly down the street.”

Dan dropped into the nearest chair, rested his face in his hands and closed his eyes. It was true. He had averted his eyes each night from the ex-soldiers as they vomited in the street. Where had his compassion gone? In France, if one of his men had drunk as much as he could to steel his spine the night before battle, Dan would have talked to him. He’d have told him he had his back.

Behind his closed lids he could see Jennings’ face as they’d driven back from the concentration camp. He could see Jess’s picture of Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier testifying about what had happened to her at Ravensbrück. And suddenly he knew the thing he’d been trying to ignore since he’d arrived back in America: it wasn’t over. There was an aftermath. And that to turn away now was the most craven thing he’d ever done.

“Get in the shower,” Dan said, his CO voice coming back to him as easily as if it had never left. “Shave. Get dressed. You have a new job and that is as editorial assistant on the New York Courier. Your first job is to come with me to see Sparrow’s parents. I’m going to write about what’s left behind after a war, and you’re going to help me.”

* * *

And so he did. In some kind of frenzied response to Jess’s articles, he wrote about the fallout in America. He didn’t just speak to the men; he spoke to the women too, the ones who’d worked and earned money and looked after themselves during the war and who’d now had to give back their jobs to the returning men. Women whose contributions had been largely forgotten, who sat disconsolate in immaculate kitchens waiting for their husbands to come home from work. He spoke to Betty Wasson, who confirmed what he’d begun to suspect: that the only job waiting for Jess in America would have been as a model once more.

In each edition of his paper he ran his stories and Jess’s stories, lest anyone forget that just because the guns had been silenced and the bleeding had stopped, war lasted forever for those who’d been there. He had copies of the papers sent to Monsieur Durant at the hotel address he’d been given.

He never knew for certain if Jess read any of his words, but he felt the quality of her photographs and her reporting strengthen and, in turn, her brilliance made him dig deeper and recover the forgotten skills of reportage that he’d not used in all those long years of war.