Before her mother could reply, Dan Hallworth arrived, smiling broadly, obviously so incredibly happy to be on the cusp of seeing Jess again after all this time. But he also halted when he saw Victorine, concern replacing the joy that D’Arcy had wanted to believe would be fixed on his face forever.

“What a mess,” Victorine said, rubbing her forehead with her hand; the patina of tragedy had made the lines on her mother’s face stark while everyone else in the room was soft-blurred with unawareness.

“What do you mean?” Dan asked.

“Jess had a baby,” Victorine said sadly. “All those years ago. One of the reasons she stayed away after you’d married Amelia was because she found out she was pregnant.”

“Jess and I have a baby?” he whispered, and D’Arcy flinched as if his pain were hers too.

“That’s just it,” Victorine said. “She didn’t know. Warren Stone…” D’Arcy could see the visible effort it took for her to keep speaking. “Warren Stone raped her. I saw it. She could never be sure whose child it was. She knew what you’d do to Warren Stone if you found out. She didn’t want to burden you with a child conceived out of hate. But she loved her daughter.”

“How do you know all of this?” Dan asked haltingly.

D’Arcy’s breath held as Victorine told Dan about Ellie and James. That Jess had thought James was Dan’s son. That she couldn’t let James and Ellie elope because Ellie might be Dan’s daughter. That instinct had told Ellie to go back to her mother’s house when the baby she’d conceived with James was ready to come. That she’d hemorrhaged and died.

“Did the baby die too?” Dan’s voice was barely audible.

Victorine smiled at last. “No. This is the baby.” She gestured to D’Arcy. “Jess gave her to me.”

“D’Arcy is Jess’s granddaughter?” Dan asked, looking at D’Arcy with love spilling from his eyes.

“And quite possibly yours, too. In a real sense, not just through me,” Victorine said, her voice suddenly choking as if she couldn’t bring herself to say any more.

What else was coming? D’Arcy remembered to breathe. And then she asked the question that had been sitting at the edges of her awareness since her mother arrived. “Where’s Jess?”

The silence said everything. It was a visceral thing, merciless, pressing itself down on D’Arcy’s shoulders, almost making her legs buckle beneath her.

Victorine tried to speak. Don’t say it, D’Arcy thought. She reached out a hand to Dan, who looked as if he might collapse too.

“I dreamed of Jess last night,” he said wretchedly. “She was lying beside me, smiling her inimitable smile. Nothing has ever made me feel so good in all my life as receiving one of those smiles.” He stopped for a moment, eyes looking through them all and perhaps into the past, to a time when Jessica May smiled just for him. “Then she kissed me. And she said…goodbye.” He breathed in sharply. “In all the time I knew her, we never said goodbye to one another. You don’t say goodbye to someone in wartime unless…”