“I wasn’t going to ask why you weren’t a curator,” Josh said. “I was going to ask you why you didn’t write about art instead of travel. But as soon as I thought it, I knew the answer. I bet travel pieces pay a lot more. And more than documentaries, which won’t pay you anything until you get a backer. I’m not judging you for spending your time doing the things that pay. I just think you’re good at making the theory come to life when you talk about it so I expect you’d write about it well too. Or film it well.”

“Thanks.” D’Arcy managed a quick smile.

“You know that Walter Lippmann quote? The one that goes: Photographs have the kind of authority over imagination today, which the printed word had yesterday, and the spoken word before that.”

“They seem utterly real,” she finished the quote for him.

“I’ve always thought it needed amending again,” he continued. “To say that film has the kind of authority over imagination which photographs had yesterday.”

“Maybe.” She shrugged, wanting to move the focus away from herself. She’d shared more with Josh about her once lofty aspirations and her past than she’d shared with any man ever. “Why do you think…”

“These photos are here?” Josh shook his head. “I have no idea.”

“You don’t think…” D’Arcy had started to say: You don’t think your photographer is Jessica May? But she stopped herself in time. Just because the photographer Josh agented had chosen to be anonymous, it didn’t follow that she was a formerly famous war photographer. Even if she did have a formerly famous photographer’s archive in her home. That Jessica May had known the person whose chateau D’Arcy was now standing in, as Josh had suggested, was the more realistic option; the other was the stuff of Hollywood movies. And Josh’s surprise at finding the photos was genuine; if his client was Jessica May, then surely she would have apprised him of that fact?

“We’re going to find a new photographer in each box?” Josh quipped, finishing her sentence in a way different to that which she’d intended.

“You’ve been sitting on a collection of once famous photographers’ works all this time and not known about it? I doubt it. But let’s take a look.” Perhaps there would be something in the boxes that made the reason these photographs were here, and the relationship between Jessica May and The Photographer, clear.

The next box was marked in English—“Unpublished.” On the top were more pictures from the Easter service, the ones that hadn’t made it into Vogue if the label on the box was right. Then more of the unsettling, cadaverous women whom D’Arcy almost didn’t want to look at, but she knew that was the point. You should never look away from the things that made you uncomfortable. “These are from one of the concentration camps,” she said quietly, and Josh took them from her, studying them carefully, as if paying tribute to the courage of these barely alive survivors.