It’s not the first broken mirror, but in his nightmares he’s usually in the woods. The images come back with the night, with the dark, flickering like newsreel. His dreaming eyes open in the black-green light, under the canopy, among the broken and the twisted things, with the living, the dead, and the in-between. The dead walk abroad again in the woods of his dreams, unwhole and unwholesome in rags and black blood. He stumbles with them and away from them over tree roots and brambles. He doesn’t need Edie to know how often he has that nightmare, how he walks in the night, or how often he’s screaming when he lurches awake.

“You scared me last night,” says Edie. “I was frightened for you.”

“It’s just being back in this place.”

“Of course. I understand that.” She turns her coffee cup and then looks back up at him. “You dreamed about Francis last night, didn’t you?”

“What makes you say that?”

“I could almost see it printed on your eyes—that, and I dreamed about him too.”

He looks at Edie. What image of Francis did her dreaming eyes see? What did she see of Francis in his eyes? The only image in Edie’s eyes now is his own reflection. “Do you want to go to Tyne Cot today?”

She shakes her head.

“You do still mean to?”

“I do, but not today.”

“You know that you don’t have to,” he says. “Like you said last night, we could just go home and try to forget.”

“Could we? Could you? What kind of life could we have if we never know? What sort of decisions could we build on that doubt?”

“We might never know.”

“I have to try,” she replies.

HE PUTS THE flowers on Percy Gray’s grave, as requested by his wife. Edie watches as he takes the photograph.

“Poor lad,” she says. “How old was he?”

“Twenty-six, the same age as I am now. I talked with his wife. He had two children.”

“How terrible for them. I wonder if one day, when they’re grown up, they’ll make this journey.”

There were burlap sacks laid out by the roadside just outside the cemetery. Harry had seen bits of leather that might have been boots, a second lieutenant’s epaulets, some unidentifiably mangled pieces of metalwork, and what looked horribly like a jawbone. He had steered Edie aside. He hopes that, if this is what they might see, his photograph will steer Percy Gray’s children away from ever making this journey. He hopes that it will be enough to silence all of the questions that he had heard in Percy’s wife’s voice. He also rather hopes that seeing this cemetery might deter Edie from wanting to visit Tyne Cot.