“No, no, no,” D’Arcy cried, holding her mother close to her as Victorine’s words were eclipsed by her sobs. “None of it is your fault. It’s not anybody’s fault. Except perhaps Warren Stone’s,” she said grimly.

Victorine touched D’Arcy’s cheek, which was wet also. “I wonder if he even knows how much grief he’s caused. So many men did so many terrible things to so many women during the war and all of those things had consequences nobody ever imagined or even knows of.” She sighed. “Jess and I agreed it would be best if we had only minimal contact thereafter, as if that could assuage our own individual guilts. But every year I sent her photos of you, which she always wrote and thanked me for. And then she called me last week, said she’d been feeling her age and that she’d just wanted to see you. To know you a little. I understand why.” Victorine paused again, swallowing. “Hence her agreeing to the exhibition here in Australia and requesting for you to be the art handler. She hadn’t actually intended for all this to come out though. But I’m glad it has.”

“I am too.” Then D’Arcy confessed to her mother the same thing she’d confessed to Josh. “I invited Dan Hallworth to come to the exhibition.”

“I know.” Victorine smiled at her daughter. “He called me.”

“Oh.” D’Arcy couldn’t meet her mother’s eyes.

“Don’t look so worried. One of the most difficult parts of all of this has been having to lie to him. After Jess gave you to me, I asked Dan if I could set up the Australian arm of World Media, which he’d always talked about. He agreed. So I came here with you and I…” D’Arcy could see the struggle it took for Victorine to say the words. “I told him not to visit me. That I didn’t want him looking over my shoulder. That I would fly to New York once a year to see him. It was why you were always left with the nanny when I went. It broke my heart. And his. But I couldn’t tell him what had happened. I simply refused to talk about my personal life in any interviews. I suspect Dan has been subtly keeping tabs on me in between my visits through colleagues who’ve moved from here to New York or vice versa. Just as I do with him.”

Victorine stood and walked to the dresser, picking up the newly reinstated framed photograph of Jess in her U.S. Army uniform, arms piled high with bouquets of flowers, the happy faces of Parisiennes all around her. She talked to the photograph rather than D’Arcy. “When I spoke to Dan yesterday, he told me he’d always believed that Jess was dead. That he’d tried for years to find her after the last time he saw her, in 1946, but the trail was completely cold. After I met with Jess in France, I honestly thought knowing everything might well destroy him, just as I’d thought the same about Jess. But perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps I made the wrong decision, keeping everything from them both.”