Worst of all was the tideline. The beach was so wide, the difference between high and low tide so marked, that the high water mark had become the most poignant reminder that what lay now on the beach had once been the living. Yardley hair tonic, Bibles, a baseball mitt. Razors, letters from home, pistol belts. Sticks of camouflage cream, a guitar, shoe polish. The remainders of men who would no longer polish their shoes.

Jess made herself walk across the beach. All you have to do is take photographs, she told herself. Your job is the easiest of anyone’s in France. And so she snapped the tideline, knowing she would ask Bel to run a wide-angle shot across a bifold, four pages in all. It would be her attempt to say, without words, that while the official rhetoric was that casualties were lower than expected—which everyone in America would take to mean that few had died—“lower” still meant thousands and that nobody could sit on Omaha Beach and feel anything other than devastated.

* * *

Five days later, Jess was still in France. As usual it wasn’t her fault; she hadn’t been able to get a ride back to London on a plane or a ship as they were full of wounded GIs whose need was greater than hers. She’d lost Iris Carpenter. Warren Stone was probably standing at port in England ready to lock Jess up the moment she returned. But she’d been smart enough to have the pilots and medics sign a paper attesting they had no room for her, which she looked forward to handing to Warren once she reached England.

She was beyond filthy; when she’d been told thirty-six hours, she hadn’t bothered to bring a change of clothes, thinking it would only weigh her down. She was almost out of film and she’d had to send all her used films back to London in a press bag despite her misgivings that it might end up in the censors’ trash can.

Now, she was picking her way across the sand, toward the cemetery, where she could see someone studying the graves, silent. His stance was familiar—back unbending, the air of command apparent—although his helmeted head and uniform made him look much the same as every other soldier in France.

The figure turned around slowly, face altering when he saw her.

“Major Hallworth,” she said, only just raising a smile.

“Captain May,” he replied, his expression matching hers.

She felt it before it happened, the press of tears at the back of her cowardly eyes, all the goddamned tears she’d refused to allow herself to shed for the past five days because a woman was not allowed to fall to pieces if she ever wanted to be allowed back into France. She didn’t say anything, willed her eyes to dry out but they refused to listen and so at last she said, her voice wobbly, “I think there’s a good chance I’m going to cry.”