She sat at her chair before her desk, pen poised over paper, thinking to write down her thoughts and then perhaps type them up when she was able to replace her typewriter. But Warren Stone’s obvious belief that women should only write about—or provide—decoration made her both unable to write and unwilling to prove his theory that women and war didn’t mix. So she waited, reasoning that if the Public Relations Office threw her out, then she’d have to go; she wouldn’t be quitting. Would she?

A tap at the door roused her and she opened it to find one of the hotel staff with a telegram for her.

Sorry Darl, she read, none of your photographs made it through, not even the ones at the hospital. The War Department censored them all. What can I say, better luck next time? Bel xx

Jess crumpled the paper in her hand.

It had all been for nothing. Worse than nothing; her one attempt at getting a story had resulted in her being confined to a hotel room, waiting to be fired. But when had Jessica May ever waited to be fired? She hurled the telegram at the wall, then stormed over to the dressing table and stared at herself in the mirror.

You’re not a coward, she told herself. So what if she wasn’t talented enough to take the photos she saw in her head? It was her job to make herself that talented. Nobody else would take those pictures; a male photojournalist would never think nurses worthy of any interest besides the prurient. And of course the War Department wouldn’t let Bel have Jess’s pictures because then everyone would know that a woman had been in a combat zone and that, apparently, was the real problem, not the death and dying and undocumented bravery of that small tent full of women in Monte Cassino. Not the children who were paying the price with their childhoods for a war they had never wished for.

Jess watched the girls outside wrapping lengths of white fabric around their dolls’ heads, their faces serious, adult. Her mind whirled. The photos she’d taken in Italy, the photos she could keep taking if only she stayed on, were not like other journalists’ pictures from Europe: soldiers in trenches with guns, pictures declaring that war was about men and battles and bullets. Her pictures from Italy would have been clarifications: miniaturized explanations that these were the consequences of that war. In every photograph, Jess had held both horror and beauty in her hands—a thing as precious and rare as an asymmetrical butterfly. It was her duty to transmit that to the world, no matter what it did to her stomach. She picked up the Rollei, pressed it to the glass and captured on film exactly what, now, child’s play had become.

Then she put the camera down and made for the door. She would put her case to the Public Relations Office. Because she had to stay.