Jennings grinned and whooped.

After that, Jess took Victorine back to her tent where Victorine had, without asking, been staying in Jess’s bed since Jess arrived. Jess lay down next to Victorine and began to tell her the fairytale Le Petit Poucet, but she made the tiny thumb-sized boy into a little girl who defeats the ogre at the end instead.

Later that night, as nurses came in and out, always exhausted, always cold, always wet, always with bloodstains on their bodies because having a shower in the middle of an Italian winter was a feat of hardihood that most hadn’t the energy for, Jess continued to write her story, in between heating cocoa in empty plasma cans on the stove. She wrote about Dan, the oh so young major who had not only a company but a little girl to think of, both of which he did without question, without resentment, with true valor of the kind, Jess realized, she’d never before witnessed.

When she’d finished, she unrolled the paper from the typewriter and reread her words. It was good, she thought, and it told a story no one else would ever tell: that of the cost exacted by war on a four-year-old child. But she had to show it to Dan. She couldn’t send it to Bel without making sure he was okay with it.

Victorine was sound asleep as Jess set her body against the wind and propelled herself through the rain to the receiving tent. Luckily she arrived during a lull; no ambulances were arriving, no bodies were lying on stretchers waiting to be attended to, and Anne, whose smile was always large as if to compensate for her diminutive stature, had a tin of Nescafé in her hand.

“I was just thinking it’d be nice to have someone to talk to,” Anne said, shaking the tin at Jess.

“Oh, yes please,” Jess said gratefully.

Anne made her a coffee and Jess leaned back against the desk to drink it.

“I don’t know if it’s just my imagination but it tastes so much better in a mug than a plasma can.” Jess wriggled her toes, wishing the hot liquid would somehow find its way down to her feet, which she hadn’t felt properly for a couple of days. “How long until spring?” she asked ruefully.

“I thought you were going back to cozy London next week,” Anne said. “Think of me when you’re having a shower.”

“I’m not allowed to stay longer than my orders. The PROs in London like to keep me in their sights.”

“I’m teasing,” Anne said with a smile. “You go back and tell your story. I’ve seen you talking to the nurses, writing down what they do and recording it all with your camera. If I wrote a letter to my momma and told her what it was like here, she’d laugh. Nobody will laugh at your pictures.”

“So you won’t mind if I come back and take up a bed in your quarters again as soon as they let me?”