Jess obeyed too. And she was surprised to hear, as she stepped across the gangplank, Private Jennings say to her shyly, “Say, do you think they’d ever put my face in a magazine?”

Sparrow guffawed, but good-naturedly; the idea of any of them adorning the pages of Vogue a ridiculous fantasy.

In reply, Jess unslung her camera from her shoulder, dropped her bags, focused and snapped a picture of Jennings and Sparrow, whose names should have been exchanged. Sparrow’s height and build made him look distinctly un-bird-like, whereas Jennings was lean and not even as tall as Jess, as if he were still young enough that he hadn’t yet finished growing and mightn’t ever finish if the war had its way.

Then a flurry of men descended on them and it became clear that something she’d taken for granted—her face in a magazine—was a novelty, a moment of whimsy, an unbelievable possibility. All the way to Italy, the men asked her to take their picture and she tried her hardest to capture the sense of them, incongruously young in their uniforms, setting off to war, but caring only if their mothers might see them and be proud of them if Jess got their faces into the pages of Vogue.

Five

At the port in Naples, she disembarked and was about to try sweet-talking her way into a truck going north when she felt a tap on her shoulder. “I’ll give you a ride,” Dan said. “Anything to stick it to Warren Stone, who wants nothing more than for you to have to mope around Naples waiting for days for transport.”

“Jeez, a few months ago in Manhattan, I had a line of men offering to take me for a ride at the end of a party. Now it’s a form of retaliation? How the mighty have fallen,” she said with a smile.

Dan laughed.

Jess eyed the overfull trucks lined up behind the command cars and officers’ jeeps. “You don’t have to drive me around. I know you have better things to do.”

“Climb in,” Dan said. “I have to stop at the field hospital anyway.”

“You don’t look sick,” Jess said doubtfully.

He leaned his arms on the jeep as he spoke, his cropped dark hair almost hidden by his helmet, but the light of an Italian morning showed plainly his youth—he could only be a couple of years older than Jess—and his handsomeness. Not like Warren Stone, who looked too perfectly put together, almost a simulation. Dan was a man who knew himself, self-assured but without hubris, the hint of a smile at her words charismatic rather than leering.

Suddenly, she understood; he probably had at least one or two nurses chasing after him. “Someone special you’d like to see at the hospital?” she asked.

“Something like that,” he replied.

At the receiving tent of the hospital, a nurse smiled at Dan as they walked in. “She’s been asking for you,” the nurse said. “I think she’s with Anne.”