Dan nodded and the men rose to their feet. They crossed the field, past lines of washing strung from tent to tent, past water bags swinging from tripods, past a phonograph singing into the night. In each tent she saw the same thing: GIs transformed into heartbreakingly young men. The Domino “Sweeten It” sugar tablet that one had carried with him since Italy because, he said in a terrible understatement, life in Europe was damn short on sweet stuff; the red tin of Tuxedo Club pomade that had sat in another man’s pocket and deflected a bullet; the green wrapper from a cake of Camay soap that a WAC with a lovely smile had given another as a keepsake because she’d had nothing else to gift.

There were also the much-folded and studied photographs of mothers or wives or girlfriends or dogs or horses or even strangers like her. So many of the men had pictures of beautiful women from magazines or calendars, their faces and bodies creased into pocket-sized shapes. What did those pictures remind the men of? Jess wondered as she saw, many times, the photograph of her naked back, the one the PRO in Italy had ruined for her.

And another that she’d forgotten: Jessica May in a floor-sweeping Lelong ballgown with a full princess skirt, thin straps crossing her back, which was otherwise bare, the fabric having been scooped away down to her sacrum. She looked as if she had no place in this world she now found herself in, as if she came from another universe entirely and that was, she supposed, the point of the pictures: they were the only means, out here, by which beauty could be held in the men’s hands. And perhaps the pictures reminded each GI that there was another world beside this one, a world they could return to, if only they survived.

She kept smiling as if it wasn’t at all disconcerting to know that so many men kept pictures of her. After one over-eager private asked if she would go to dinner with him in Paris once it was liberated and she’d deflected him, kindly, she saw Dan studying her face. Before she could ask him why, Jennings interrupted them. “Sir, there’s a man asking for Captain May.”

“A man?” Dan queried.

Jennings flushed. “He said his name was—”

“Warren Stone.” A voice Jess recognized all too well cut across Jennings.

“It came to my attention that you were missing,” he said to Jess. “I was about to put an order out on you to be apprehended and taken back to London.”

“Did you miss me?” Jess said glibly, to hide the fact that she was furious. She was acutely aware of the many eyes on her, eyes belonging to men whose stories she’d been photographing for the past hour, men who were treating her like she was one of them, which Warren Stone was about to destroy by making them think she was his possession and worthy only of contempt.