All Jess could do was squeeze his hand. As each man clamored to tell her about the picture she’d taken of him, or his brother or friend or neighbor, or of the story she’d written him into, she was swept off to the mess tent by a wave of admiring men, deposited at a table and given a tin mess tray.

“C-rations,” Jess said, breathing in the smell of a meat and vegetable stew she was sure she would never have eaten two years ago but that now looked better than caviar. “And bread with butter! I haven’t seen anything other than a K-ration in two weeks.”

“Then you should have this to go with it.” Jess looked up to see Dan passing her a mug with what she assumed might be coffee and discovered—coughing when she took too large a swallow—was cider.

He gestured behind him to a cider barrel. “We found it and thought it’d be a shame to waste it. Especially now that we have a week off.” He handed her a cigarette.

“Lucky Strikes,” she sighed, lighting up. “They only have Chesterfields at the hospital. You know, I might never leave here.”

At which the men cheered, as if they’d be more than happy to have her stay. While she chatted over dinner and put the Rollei into service, all Jess could think was: at last she’d found a place where she belonged.

* * *

At dinner, the men who’d known Victorine in Italy asked about her. “If I’d realized I was coming to dinner,” Jess said, “I would have brought the pictures she’s drawn for you. She thought the pictures might stand in for her good-luck kisses.”

“Some GIs over in the 371st Fighter Group have got their own Victorine,” Sparrow mumbled through a mouthful of food, and the other men nodded. “A girl called Yvette,” Sparrow continued. “Krauts killed her sister and wounded Yvette so bad she had both her legs amputated. So the GIs made her a tent from parachute silk and they fly her with them wherever they go. Because she has no one else to look after her. She’s their mascot, like Vicki was ours.”

Nobody spoke but the night flickered with the poignancy inherent in what Sparrow had said: both that the men needed something to believe in—anything—in order to keep hope alive, and that somewhere in the darkness there was a girl called Yvette who could no longer walk.

“We’ve all had to find new good-luck charms now we no longer have Vicki.” Sparrow finished both his dinner and his story and Jess wondered if she’d misjudged him when she first met him in the jeep in London, whether he had more substance than she’d thought. Or if war had deepened his character.

“Would you mind if I photographed your lucky charms?” she asked, looking across at Dan for permission, knowing that pictures of the men with their new talismanic objects would be a moving follow-up to her Victorine story.