“And so are you.” He touches his glass to hers.

“More now, though.” She raises her glass to him. “What will we do, Harry?”

She exhales. He watches the smoke curl from her lips. “I don’t know.”

THEY LEAVE THEIR coins on the table and walk back toward the hotel. They pass a bag of fried potatoes between them and Edie links his arm. Her eyelids are drooping slightly and he wonders if she is perhaps slightly drunk. Ahead of them a woman pushes a man in a wheelchair.

“It is a good and noble and proper thing for a widow-woman to take on a damaged man,” she says, “to come to a mutually beneficial arrangement, to betroth him a lifetime of care, as it were.”

“And where did you read that?”

“In a newspaper. Do you think they resent each other?”

“Sometimes. They probably also need each other.”

“I did love him, you know,” she says. “I never stopped loving him. But he’d changed when he came back on leave. It was difficult. We didn’t know how to talk to each other. When I read that word damaged in the newspaper recently, I thought of how he’d been that week. I mean, it’s not just walking sticks and wheelchairs, is it? I’m not wrong, am I?”

“No. I understand. I know how he was, and I worried for you when he was coming home. I guessed that it might have been like that for you.”

“That doesn’t mean that I want it to be this way, though.” She waves a chip in emphasis. “We would have found a way through it. I would have looked after him. If I could have him walk down this street towards me now, I would.”

She says it a little too forcefully to be convincing. Harry stares down the street. The houses ahead have all been shorn up with scaffolding to make them safe. “Of course.”

“I cried in a department store after the letter came, when they told me that he wasn’t coming back. There was a vase of irises on the counter, and suddenly it struck me that he would never again be there with a bunch of flowers in his hands. The smell of them! The poor shop assistant didn’t know where to look.”

He thinks of the blue irises in her kitchen. How long after the letter had she made the decision to start buying flowers for herself? He looks at Edie and considers what conclusions that decision process must have contained. “Francis wouldn’t want you to cry,” he says and wonders if that is quite true.

“Sometimes I look up at you and it’s him. It takes me aback. I forget sometimes just how very alike you are.”