Jess sent the martini glass the same way as the magazine. “I meant that you should go out and take photographs. Not sell old pictures of me to Kotex to use for an ad you know will make me persona non grata in the modeling world. The only reason you can’t hold a camera steady is because you drink too much. Your hand would be fine with just a little practice.”

Emile finished his drink, then picked up hers and took a long swallow. “I did nothing wrong.”

Jess sighed. She had to say it. It’s over. She had to forget looking up at a jazz club in Paris and seeing this man smile rakishly at her, had to forget dancing with him into the early hours of the morning, had to forget doing that most romantic of all things: walking hand in hand through the streets of Paris as the sun came up, stopping to buy espresso, stopping to kiss. Had to forget that what she’d had with him was a kind of love; hedonistic, exciting, suited to that time in her life when she’d thought she might go mad because both her parents had just died and she had nobody. Except Emile.

“The New Yorker telephoned for you this morning,” Emile said.

Jess wished she could ask him at another time, when he was less drunk and more merciful, but she had to know. “What did they say?”

“They said your idea didn’t interest them.” Emile’s eyes roamed the room, settling on Gene Tierney, which was lucky; he wouldn’t see the sting of his words made manifest in the clench of her jaw.

Being rejected at a go-see had never bothered her as much as a rejection by The New Yorker. She’d hoped her pitch might be a way to build on the handful of articles she’d written and photographed for Vogue, about the female artists from Parsons School of Design who were now painting camouflage on airplanes and designing propaganda posters instead of creating their own artworks. This time, Jess had wanted to write about what might happen to all those women when the war ended and the men returned and reclaimed their old jobs. What would the women do with all their new skills? Would there still be jobs for them?

Jess had wanted to stand up high on a ladder and take photographs in the factories, pictures that showed how many women there were; not just one or two but an entire generation. She knew nobody could dismiss a photograph the same way they might consider words to be exaggerated. And she’d wanted to feel as if she was doing something that mattered; instead of screaming her outrage about fascism into the wind at the Place de la Concorde as she’d done when she was younger, she could show that war reverberated in ways beyond bullets, that the ramifications could be found in the hands of a woman who’d once sculpted bronze and who now fashioned aircraft propellers.