Hours later, Jess walked back to the road, leaning against a wall, thinking, waiting for the next vehicle to drive by. Why was she there? What good would any of her photographs do? Show truths that mothers wouldn’t want to know, remind people of things that should never be relived. She needed to get ready to offer a smile and a stream of banter to pay for her ride back to the hospital but the last thing she felt like, after clambering through the carcass of Saint-Lô, was being the Jessica May everyone thought she was. Before she was ready, she saw the distant dust cloud even more thickly and she waved to flag down the oncoming jeep.

The jeep pulled to a stop and she couldn’t help but raise a smile when she saw Dan’s face.

“Don’t tell me, you still don’t get a driver or a jeep,” he said, face grim as he jumped out.

She shrugged. “You know I don’t.”

“It’s lucky I was coming to find you, then,” he said in a very un-Dan-like tone. “You can’t stand around outside towns that have only just been liberated. You don’t know what’s about to fall out of the sky, or if there are snipers still around. I stopped at the hospital and Major Henderson said you’d left eight hours ago. I thought you’d had the shit strafed out of you by the Stukas.”

“All I have to rely on are the reports that come in from the wounded men about where the front has moved to. I’m doing my best with the little information I have,” she said. “So don’t be mad. I don’t need mad right now.”

“Tell me you at least have a gun.”

She shook her head.

He swore again. “I’ve got a spare Colt in the jeep. It’s yours. Come to dinner and I’ll show you how to shoot it.”

“Dinner?”

“Dinner, as in food. On plates, not out of a ration box. Come to the camp and have dinner.”

“Is that an order?”

“Yes,” he said, smiling at last.

“Well, in that case…” She climbed into the jeep and tilted her head back, closing her eyes, the images from the past few days shuttering relentlessly through her mind. She snapped her eyes open and looked at Dan.

“How the hell do you do it?” she asked.

He didn’t have to ask, do what? Instead he grinned and said, “Well, my preferred method is to take correspondents out to a fine dinner of C-rations at my equally fine mess tent.”

She hit his arm. “At least you called me a correspondent rather than a model.”

“I want to finish the evening alive,” he teased.

The banter relaxed her for the first time in days. A friendship like this was almost the only way to stay sane and she knew she would do her damnedest never to do anything to ruin it.

“I have something else for you besides a gun,” Dan said. “In the back.”