From inside the restaurant comes the noise of scraped chairs and china. The waitress collects bread crusts from the next table and pours salt where the wine had run red through the tablecloth. Her mouth recites a silent ceremony. In truth, being back here, he sees Francis everywhere. He’s there in shadows and at shuttered windows, in movements, in memories, in his own reflection. Francis’s name is in the shape that the waitress’s mouth makes. But he can’t tell Edie that.

“You were right in what you said: I do think that he might have sent that photograph himself. You don’t think he did?”

“No.”

“But are you certain? Can you be absolutely sure?”

“Edie, I was there.”

A moth flickers at the candle flame. She licks her fingers and snuffs the flame out. “Of course. You know, I think I might be losing my marbles.”

They walk back slowly through the dim streets. Waiters are taking the chairs and tables in and emptying ice buckets on the potted plants. At night, with so few lights at windows, it’s all the more a city of backless façades and ghosts. Bats are streaking between the ruins, arrowing across the night-blue sky. They listen to the sound of the town: a motor engine starts up, a shutter closes, the wind seems to hum as it moves through the ruins. They are the only people on the street.

“Twenty thousand people used to live in this town,” he tells her.

“Don’t you find it all terribly lonely?”

“Yes.”

She says that she’s glad she’s not here on her own now. She tells him that she needs him to be here. She thanks him by her bedroom door.

Harry stares at the ceiling. A vehicle passes with a sudden roar and its headlights strobe across the walls. For a second he tenses. When it is gone it leaves behind a thin sliver of light through the paper wall. He can hear her crying in the next room. It takes all his willpower not to walk to the wall.

Chapter Forty: Edie

Chapter Forty

Edie

Ypres, September 1921

DID YOU SLEEP?” HARRY ASKS.

“Not terribly well. My brain was all in a fizz. I kept imagining that I could hear crunching shells and marching feet. Are there armies of ghost soldiers out there?”

“Only armies of builders.”

She listens to him talk about masons and carpenters, and a six a.m. percussion of chisels and saws that had drilled into his dreams, but he looks like he hasn’t slept at all either.

“We need tea. Shall I serve?”

He smells of peppermint and shaving soap as he leans toward her, and just for a moment it is the long-ago scent of his brother’s skin. Just for a moment she wants to close her eyes and put her face to Harry’s neck, just to breathe him in and forget the rest.

“What?” he says.