He looks tired too, looks like he hasn’t been sleeping again, but he glances toward her and grins. “It’s delightful to have you telling me off again. Utterly ruddy joyous. Don’t feel that you can’t wag a finger at me. Don’t feel you have to stop.”

But his grin fades as they step out onto the station steps, and then she must turn and look at it too.

“My God. I knew it was bad, but not this bad. We had no idea at home,” she says. “Absolutely no idea. How you must have hated us.”

She looks to him, wishing that he would say something, wishing that he had some explanation for the wreck of a town in front of them, but Harry just shakes his head.

“It’s not what I expected,” she says, because there has to be something to say. “Though I’m not sure what I expected.” She needs to put a hand to his shoulder as they walk down the steps. “Do you mind? I feel like my knees might go at any minute.”

“Don’t worry. It’s only a short walk and I’ve managed to find a hotel with walls—and even some roof.”

“Is it the first time that you’ve been back?” she asks.

“Yes, it’s almost three years. It actually looks more knocked about now than it did then. I think it’s the fact that people are living among it, that there are shops again and schoolchildren and curtains at windows. It highlights what a wilderness it is.”

Many of the buildings on the street from the station have lost their top floors. They are just fragments of frontage. An arm-in-arm couple stroll ahead of them with a black dog, its tail tick-tocking. They have to keep stepping off the pavement to avoid the piles of bricks.

“It’s like something fantastical,” she says. “It’s not quite of this earth and our time. I’m horrified and fascinated all at once. I want to babble and yet I’m utterly lost for words. Is that the wrong reaction?”

He shrugs. “I don’t know that there is a right reaction.”

“I feel like I’ve arrived in Africa.”

She watches his boots at her side. She feels steadier looking at Harry’s sensible, serviceable boots making a straight line, but the ground still feels like it’s trembling beneath her feet.