The railway tracks in Poperinghe stretch east and west. She is seven miles—one train stop—from Ypres, where he now might be. If she steps onto the next train, will she have to lie at his side again? Will she have to listen to his breath and launder his shirts and put her hands through his hair? There was a time, before all this began, when she had liked to put her face to Francis’s neck and just breathe him in, when she couldn’t keep her fingers away from his strong white shoulders and the glossed curl of his hair. There was a time when she couldn’t lie close enough to him. The man who had left her house in 1914 knew the names of all the birds and the trees, and she loved him for that. He read books about ancient civilizations and African countries. He whispered poems in her ear and plaited her hair. But that was not the man who had come back in September 1917. Could all those fundamental parts of him really have permanently disappeared? What had happened to all that they had shared? How had they moved so far apart?

When he had walked back in, Francis had brought strangeness into the house and she had found herself moving around him. She could no longer predict the reactions of the man whom she’d lived with since she was seventeen. There was something wild and unknowable about this version of Francis. The look that he gave her when she asked him if he wanted to talk about Will. The way his lip curled when she laid a blanket over him. It wasn’t that he had raised a hand to her, or even raised his voice, but she saw the flinch on his face. The trigger. She no longer knew how he would react to anything she said, and so fewer and fewer words had passed between them. What might he need to say to her now, then? She looks at her watch.

She has never told anyone how difficult it was, that last week with Francis, because it makes her sound like a terrible woman. A terrible wife. How could she admit to anyone how difficult she had found it to be with him? That she didn’t know how to speak to him? That she felt some relief when the week ended and he went back? How can she tell anyone how she opened all of the windows after he went, and scrubbed the floors, and boiled the bedsheets? How could she admit to anyone that she had been frightened of that man and how she felt about him?