“Which was?” Victorine was aware that her heart had started to beat faster, as if she knew what the revelation would be somewhere in her subconscious, even though her thinking mind hadn’t yet located the right pictures and arranged them in the proper order.

“That she and James were quite possibly half-brother and sister. That I couldn’t be sure. That there were two possibilities as to whom Ellie’s father was. Dan Hallworth or…” She stopped speaking.

The page in Victorine’s head finally turned to the picture she’d forgotten: Jess with her back against a tree. A man holding Jess’s neck so the red flush caused by the pressure of his fingers stained Jess’s skin like blood. The noises the man had made. The look of anguish on Jess’s face. “You were raped,” she whispered.

Jess closed her eyes. Then she nodded.

“How can you ever tell your own daughter that she might be the outcome of rape?” Jess stood up and stared at the gardens. “Instead I told Ellie that I’d been foolish and had slept with another man at the same time so I had no way of knowing if Dan was her father. Regardless, she couldn’t marry James because of the possibility that they were related. She was furious with me. She left the house that night anyway. But not with James.”

A long silence filled the room, then Jess finally spoke again. “I don’t know where Ellie went; she never told me. Somewhere to try to mend her broken heart. She returned here the day before the baby was born, just last week. She was ill and sad and I don’t think she’d been looking after herself. But that wasn’t the problem. She hemorrhaged in labor. Her placenta wasn’t in the right place, but because she hadn’t had proper prenatal care nobody knew.” Jess’s tears were falling freely now, a ceaseless flood.

“Where is Ellie now?” Victorine asked fearfully.

“She died,” Jess said, looking upward into nothing, a Mater Dolorosa asking the world to tell her why this had happened, searching for an explanation for that which was beyond understanding.

Victorine was unable to speak. Because the explanation she could offer wouldn’t fix anything. Ellie, that beautiful woman, heartbroken by something that had happened back in 1945, would still be dead. How could she tell Jess that none of it needed to happen. Because James wasn’t Dan’s son. Which meant James and Ellie could not possibly be half-brother and sister, even if Ellie was Dan’s daughter.

Victorine stood up and walked over to the doors. She leaned one hand against the frame, not seeing anything, mind racing with questions. Surely Jess would be relieved to know that Ellie and James weren’t related? Or would that only make her blame herself for having kept the lovers apart needlessly?

Jess joined Victorine, both women staring down toward the canal, unspeaking. Then Jess reached out to take Victorine’s hand, holding it tightly, painfully so, but Victorine didn’t pull away. Instead she felt her own hand grip Jess’s just as tightly, holding on to one another, to this secret, to loss and the past and the bitter legacy of a long-ago war.