“Really,” Dan said.

“I think you’ll find,” Victorine said with a teary smile, “that you own Jess’s chateau. When she gave you to me, she told me that she would bequeath it to you upon her death.”

“And you should also come to New York and meet James. Your father,” Dan added.

A father. Something D’Arcy never thought she’d have. She looked across at Victorine, who nodded, blinking hard.

There were almost too many things happening for D’Arcy to grasp them as individual hurts and losses, as well as wonders and astonishments. She suddenly felt as if she understood Balzac’s belief that a person was made up of ghostly layers, layers that image-taking stripped away each time a photograph was taken. The photographs Jess had taken of D’Arcy had stripped away much of what D’Arcy thought she was, and everything she didn’t need. She hoped that her documentary about Jess had done the same, that it had torn off the layers Jess had wrapped herself in after the war so she now appeared as she really was: bold and strong and beautiful and so well loved.

Then, as Victorine embraced Dan, Josh and D’Arcy turned to look at the images of Jessica May moving across the screen before them, smiling as if giving them her blessing. A blessing, D’Arcy realized now, Jess had bestowed on her when they’d embraced on the terrace of the chateau, an embrace D’Arcy could feel again now, reaching beyond death, bequeathing to Josh and D’Arcy the promise of a long and beautiful life. The long and beautiful life that Dan and Jess had never had, the long and beautiful life that D’Arcy had never imagined having, lay now, astonishingly, before her. She sealed the promise with a long and beautiful kiss on Josh’s lips.

Author’s Note

In some ways, this was the hardest book I’ve ever written. So many characters and storylines and time periods to bring together the way I imagined them in my head. In other ways, it was the easiest book I’ve ever written. Jess and Dan were two characters who came effortlessly to me; they were a true gift from the writing muse. But of course there were lots of reasons this happened, not the least because of all the amazing research material that couldn’t help but inspire me to write.

I first became aware of Lee Miller when I was writing The Paris Seamstress. Her story was immediately captivating: a famous model and Man Ray’s lover, she wrote and photographed some extraordinary stories for Vogue during World War II, but her work was largely forgotten thereafter. Her son, Antony Penrose, knew very little of his mother’s remarkable past until after she’d died. It was his wife, when clearing out the attic at Farley Farm—Miller’s home—who came across Miller’s sixty thousand photographs and negatives, plus clippings, cameras and wartime souvenirs, stored haphazardly in cardboard boxes. Penrose resurrected her legacy and she is now widely regarded as one of the war’s preeminent photojournalists.