She wondered now if he’d be able to look at himself. She understood all too well—because it had been done to her—that a photograph could trap a person in an incarnation unknown to them, that seeing such an image could feel like nakedness, bringing with it the revelation that the photographer had exposed a part of them that would ordinarily be hidden from the world. Jess hadn’t comprehended just what she’d caught and it was only in seeing the print that she realized it was a one-in-a-million shot, that she might never photograph anything quite as poignant again.

Dan’s head jerked back as Victorine held the magazine aloft and awareness hit him. Then the nurses crowded around and Jess said, “Let’s go,” wanting to get him away from seeing what Jess had seen: evidence of the fracture in his armor.

She knew now that everything Emile had told her about photography, her entire experience of it as both her parents’ child-photographer and as a model before the lens was wrong. The chance moment was what mattered out here, that and the premonition before the moment happened so that one was ready. Not the careful positioning of a person or an object or a light source, not the fully imagined outcome of what would be caught after aligning the camera and pressing the button. Her job was to extemporize—not to plan—and thus expose the reality that had been obscured by the reduction of everything around them into three letters and one simple word: war.

And that’s what she’d do once again on this outing with Dan. “Where are we going?” she asked as they neared the jeep.

“It’s Easter,” Dan said as if that explained everything.

Jess thought for a moment and realized he was right, but that in this place divorced from real time, each day blended into the next; nameless. “And we’re going to church?” she quipped.

“Sort of,” he said and Jess just about burst with curiosity.

Then he added, “I’ll be in England soon. My division’s been recalled. I’m taking Victorine back with me, putting her in a boarding school there.”

Which meant only one thing. It was coming. The mammoth attack on Europe. An attack Jess would never be allowed to witness or report on. She wanted to thump her hand on the jeep from the injustice of it. Instead, she said, “I’ll visit her whenever I can. I mean, I’ll have plenty of time if Warren Stone has his way.”

Dan stopped in front of the car. “You’re a great photographer, Jess. Keep fighting them.”

And she found herself momentarily speechless at having received admiration of the real kind, not of her face or her cleavage or her legs. “Thanks,” she said at last, before she climbed into the jeep.

Dan drove fast, but expertly, as if they had somewhere they needed to be, and soon he’d stopped and was jumping out. “Now we have to walk.”

They joined the column of soldiers winding up the escarpment before them, the dawn sun just beginning to tinge the landscape orange, mist wafting around, then disappearing below them as they climbed higher so that they seemed to have stepped over the clouds and into the sky. Hardly anyone spoke, and all Jess could hear were boots shuffling through sand, guns rattling on shoulders, and the one warning Dan had given her: “Don’t step off the path. There are mines everywhere.”