“Not a bit.” Anne took Jess’s empty cup from her and refilled it.

“How do I see Dan if I need to?”

Anne groaned. “That man could thread all the hearts he’s won onto a string and it’d reach New York. Don’t tell me he can add another one to his chain?”

Jess laughed. “My heart is safe in my chest. He does seem popular though.”

“Popular is an understatement. Most of the nurses would follow him into battle if it meant spending another minute with him. Glad you’ve got more sense.”

“Why? Is he…” Jess stopped. Did she want to know the answer to her question: Is he not worth their hearts?

“Oh no, he’s as good a man as he is good-looking. Says he made major because everyone else was dead and they didn’t have a choice, but a couple of months ago he went out into no-man’s-land and brought back a boy who’d been injured out there; they could hear his groans between shell bursts. Nothing makes a company more panicky than hearing one of their own, injured and alone. He saved that GI’s life.”

“She doesn’t want to hear about that.”

Jess whirled around at the sound of Dan’s voice. He was standing behind them, cheeks pinked with embarrassment, tiredness fixed deep in his eyes, an ugly graze on the back of his hand. “How long have you been there?” she asked.

“Long enough to learn my charms are wasted on you,” he grinned, clearly eager to turn the conversation away from Anne’s recitation of his acts of good.

“You’ve come to get that boy Jennings, haven’t you?” Anne asked. “Wait there.” She disappeared into the ward.

“Surely it’s not a major’s job to escort privates back to the front?” Jess said, offering him her mug before she realized what she was doing and that he probably didn’t want her half-finished coffee. “Sorry,” she apologized.

But he took the mug from her. “Hey, you can’t take it back once you’ve offered it.” He finished it in one long swallow. “Damn that’s good. And no, majors don’t normally escort privates around but I’ve known Jennings since we were kids and his mom told me she’d kill me if anything happened to him. Given his ability to not require actual shelling and bullets in order to injure himself, I thought I’d better look after him. Don’t want to survive the war only to be killed by Jennings’ mom,” he added.

Jess laughed. This was why all the nurses were in love with him. He was that rarest of all things: a nice man. “Do you want to see Victorine before you go?”

“Do you know where she is?” he asked, tiredness suddenly erased from his face, which was now filled with an eagerness of the kind Jess hadn’t seen him turn toward any of the nurses who wanted to give him their hearts.

Jess nodded and he followed her outside where she stopped short.

“What is it?” he asked after he nearly collided with her.