“Luggage?” Harry refocuses on her face, winds back, and finds himself five years later, on a train heading east again. “It’s enough to lug around. I don’t expect to be invited to many cocktail parties.”

“You’ve renounced dinner jackets? How reckless. How austere. You’re not fasting too?” She offers him a bag of sweets and a half smile.

“I’m uncomplicating it,” he says and wonders if it’s true. “But I do succumb to caramels.”

THERE ARE POTTED tulips on the steps of the hotel, a glossy, rich, grotesque red. He looks up to the boarded panes above as Rachel reads the card in the window.

“Deux chambres?” says the woman at the desk.

“Did you see that eyebrow?” Rachel laughs as they climb the stairs. “Is it humanly possible to look more arch? I’m not sure that I’ve ever felt more scrutinized and doubted.”

“Nice to see that propriety is being policed. She’s marked you down in the register as doubtful, you know. Better mind your manners, miss.”

“Mrs.,” she corrects.

“Of course.” He is sad to see that the humor in her face has gone. “I’m sorry.”

An English voice down the corridor complains over the quality of pillows and the lack of hot water. Harry shuts the door on it, but they’re all around: there are voices in the ceiling, under the floor, and in the walls. This hotel is full of voices. They are all talking, all passing a commentary, all pushing their words through the walls. He props Edie’s postcard beside the bedside lamp and it is her voice that he hears again then, as clear as if she were here, in this room, speaking into his ear.

“It was almost like seeing a ghost,” she had said, as she told him about the photograph of Francis.

“I can understand that.”

“It wasn’t you who sent it?”

Did she suspect that? Was that why her eyes had searched his face? “No, of course not.”

“And not him?”

“How could it be?”

Harry had stepped away from her, looking through the lens. For a moment he had been glad to have the barrier of the camera between them, not to have to look her directly in the eye, as he considered his response to her question. In that reeling moment, he had asked himself how she could think that—but then why was it not easier to reply?

He focused in on her features, but her face told him nothing more. Backlit, she glowed at the edges. He watched her eyes lift, following an arrow of geese overhead. Should it not be Francis—her husband, his brother—on this side of the camera? Should it not still be that way around? Did she have any good reason to be asking that question? Harry had leaned against the wall to steady himself. Edie’s photograph image offered him the bag of peppermint candies.