“You could say that.” He pulls the ribbon out of his pocket and holds it out toward Cassie.

“Hers?”

“Yes.”

“Saint Christopher, who looks after travelers? What’s the line from the story? ‘The whole world couldn’t have been as heavy on my shoulders as you were’? He doesn’t seem to have done you many favors, does he?”

He winds the ribbon through his fingers and rewinds time. “It can’t do any harm, can it?” Edie had said as she handed it to him on the driveway of the hospital. If she hadn’t given it to him, could things have been different? Would Francis ever have been in the Blue Angel? Would she have given it to Francis instead, and where then would they all be now? Would Francis have come home at the end of the war and been a husband again, even a father? Did all of that harm happen as a consequence of that action? Harry shakes his head. “I can’t load much blame onto a trinket and a ribbon.”

“Aren’t you a bit furious at him, though?”

“At Francis, you mean?” He looks down at his glass. “How could I be? Why should I be? He wasn’t well. I see that now. He wasn’t thinking rationally. Everything had just got out of proportion. I understand now just how unwell he was, and with his mind in that state, an ungrounded suspicion became an obsession, and then tore him apart. Perhaps I should have taken better care of him. Perhaps there’s more that I could have done. If anything, it’s me that’s the guilty party, only I’m not sure that I’m guilty of any sin beyond the occasional thought.”

“Occasional?” She raises an eyebrow.

“But I didn’t do anything about it. I wouldn’t have done. I never said anything to her. Not really. I wouldn’t have betrayed him, or encouraged Edie to do anything that she shouldn’t. That just wouldn’t have happened.”

“You do seem to have been a bit hard-done-by.”

Beyond the window of the brasserie a woman is pushing a man in a wheelchair through the square. She is pointing up at the architecture; he is staring at the blanket over his knees. “No,” Harry replies. “Not in the grand scheme of things. I’m the one that made it through, aren’t I? I’m vaguely whole and healthy. I don’t think I have a right to feel wronged.”

“Don’t be so ruddy reasonable,” says Cassie.

He laughs. She rolls her eyes and reaches across for his packet of cigarettes.

“What will you do now, then?”