Then a car drew up in a hurry on the dirt road alongside the field. Belinda Bower, Vogue editor and Jess’s friend, stepped out and picked her way across the field in a pencil skirt and heels, wobbling, but clearly determined not to appear as out of place as a tuxedo at the seaside. Toni lowered the camera and Jess straightened. Bel never interfered with photo shoots. Something was up.

Which Belinda confirmed moments later when she reached Jess and showed her a full-page Kotex advertisement in McCall’s. The words, It has women’s enthusiastic approval! were emblazoned across the top of the page. Underneath, Jessica May posed idly in an evening gown as if she hadn’t a care in the world, and especially not about the taboo subject of menstruation.

“Goddammit!” Jess said.

“Goddammit,” Bel agreed. “Shoot’s off,” she called to the makeup artists, the hairstylists, Toni’s assistant, and Toni.

Toni packed her camera away without asking any questions. But the eyes of everyone else remained fixed on Jess and Bel. There was no good reason to call off a shoot that everyone could see had been going exceptionally well. Unless Jessica May was in some kind of trouble. And that was both likely and a toothsome piece of gossip nobody wanted to miss.

“It had to be Emile,” Jess muttered as they walked across to the privacy of the cows. “He took that picture of me last year. He must have sold it to Kotex.”

“I thought so,” Bel replied. “I tried to get Condé to change his mind; hell, he wanted me to change his mind—you know he adores you—but we also know the advertisers would abandon us quicker than Joan Blondell can remove her clothes.”

Despite everything, Jess grinned at the quip. Then she sighed. Bel was right. None of Vogue’s advertisers would want their products appearing in the magazine that had the Kotex girl on the cover. Because the Kotex girl was what she’d be known as from now on. Even living with Emile out of wedlock wasn’t as great a sin as menstruation. “How long will I be on the blacklist?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Belinda said honestly. “It depends how long Kotex run the ad for. Condé hopes we can have you back modeling for us next year, but…”

“Until then, I should murder Emile and find some other way to pay the rent,” Jess finished.

“Condé still wants you at his party tonight. He won’t drop you for everything.”

Just my livelihood, Jess thought grimly. At the age of twenty-two and after almost three years, hundreds of outfits, countless lipstick re-applications, innumerable images of Jessica May in the pages of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar and Glamour and much fussing over her blonde hair, it was over. She would no longer perpetuate a fantasy that, despite the war, a world still existed in which a woman might buy a low-cut bathing suit and, on a trip to the seaside, meet a prince and fall in love.