“You did come!” Victorine beamed and kissed both of Jess’s cheeks and Jess returned the gesture.

A woman Jess assumed was the school mistress appeared and nodded at Jess. “You must be Miss May,” she said, a friendly smile on her face. “Why don’t you take Miss May for a walk, Victorine? You can stop by the kitchen and ask the cook for some cake.”

“Thank you,” Jess said. “I’m sorry if I’ve caused any disruption.”

“You haven’t,” the woman said firmly. “She’s been pining for Major Hallworth and while we try to supply as many hugs as we can, it’s not quite the same. It will do her the world of good to spend the morning with you.”

So Jess and Victorine sat down on a stile in a field and ate chocolate cake. Jess told Victorine about her own parents, how they’d died too, just like Victorine’s papa at the hospital in Italy, and how, even though she was older than Victorine, she still missed them. “I thought maybe we could look after each other,” Jess finished. “I don’t have parents and nor do you anymore, and it would be nice to know that there was someone else who could be my family.”

Victorine beamed. “I will be your family,” she said seriously. “And you will be mine. Dan is my family too. So now he is yours as well.”

Jess grinned as she thought about writing that in a letter to Dan. All he’d wanted her to do was pay Victorine a visit and now they’d been proclaimed family. But she also knew that the most important thing was to get Victorine through this war. If they could do that, then everything else would work out too. Or so she was trying to make herself believe.

But that belief lay in tatters later that day when she heard from the pilots who’d made three hundred and twenty-five missions over to Normandy the night before to resupply Dan’s airborne division. “We threw the stuff out for the poor bastards and prayed; the Army doesn’t know where they are so it’s anyone’s guess if they find their supplies,” one of them said to her between long drags of cigarette smoke.

“What do you mean?” she made herself ask.

“The fellas in the airborne division got dropped anywhere and everywhere because the Krauts were shooting down the planes. Hardly any of them are where they’re meant to be. That’s if they even made it to the ground alive, the way Jerry was shooting at them as they dropped.”

Jess held up her hand. “I get it,” she said.

Now she had yet another reason to find a way into France. To find out if Dan was okay. She wouldn’t be able to see Victorine again until she knew because Victorine would see it in her face: her fear that the worst had happened.

* * *

Warren Stone was waiting for her in the bar when she returned. “Your friend’s been arrested,” he said, triumph in his voice. “Mrs. Ernest Hemingway stowed away in the bathroom of a hospital ship and got herself onto a water ambulance that landed on the beach. As if that wasn’t stupid enough, she sent a story through to Collier’s, reporting what she saw. I picked it up from the censor. She convicted herself.”