He remembers recording the thought on paper. It was the day they had danced at Denham Hall. Had Francis then read these words two months on? Had he seen that whole scene?

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry? How can you have been so stupid, Harry? How can you have been so careless?”

“I was careful. I didn’t think that he’d ever read it.”

“But he did read it! And then by the end of that month he was gone.” She turns her back to him. He stretches his hand toward her. She flinches with his touch.

“You’ve no reason to feel guilty. You never did anything wrong. We never did anything wrong.”

“But I didn’t tell him the truth, and once he’d read this, he knew that, didn’t he? I hadn’t told him that I’d seen you in the hospital. If he knew I’d chosen to keep that from him, what else might I have been lying about?”

She turns and thrusts the opened page toward him. He sees his own writing. I fear that I love the one woman that I absolutely shouldn’t, he had written.

“No wonder he couldn’t look at you,” she says. “I’m not sure that I can look at you. Francis suspected me of something that I hadn’t done. You made me a guilty party.”

“I’m the only one that’s guilty—and only guilty of thoughts, never deeds. There’s nothing written there that implies that you returned my feelings. Is there?”

“But I did,” she says. “That’s the worst of it.”

He stares at her with the ruins of his war all around her. Might it really have been different? Could it still be?

“Edie—”

She pushes his hand back. “Please, just leave me alone, Harry,” she says.

WHAT IS SHE feeling, he considers, as she reads his hidden words? Does she feel like she’s prying? Does she realize that all of his words are addressed to her? Does it strike her that he wrote to her every day?

He watches her through the gap in the wall as she reads the words that he couldn’t—and still can’t—say to her face. She is sitting on the bed. Quite still. The only movement is the occasional flick of the page.

When she has read it all, will she forgive him? Can she understand how he felt? Could she still return it? He is only grateful that the diary ends before Francis came back, before he was put on the cross and fell. She still doesn’t need to know that part.