“I’ve got a list of twenty-odd graves that I’ve still got to photograph.” That list, in his pocket, presently seems like a heavy thing to have to carry around. It is so much more than just a piece of paper—so many people’s hopes and fears and needs. He feels the magnitude and rawness of that more than ever now.

“Oh, Harry. Do you really have to do it?”

“It’s different for Ralph, isn’t it?”

“Ralph does it because he’s driven to do it. It’s more of a calling than work. He has absolutely no doubts that he’s doing the right thing. I sometimes wonder if it’s some sort of penance too—him working himself back to a moral even keel—but I wouldn’t say that to him and, however he reasons it, he wouldn’t have it otherwise.” She takes a sip of her drink and looks at Harry over the rim of her glass. “It hasn’t settled at all yet, has it? It’s like all the debris is all still falling down. We’re just finding our feet and picking our way through the ruins.”

“And that’s just it: I don’t know the way. I don’t know which direction I’m meant to be going in now.” He pushes the ribbon away. “I want to do the right thing, but I don’t know what that is any longer.”

“You sound like a man in need of a compass.” Cassie dabs her cigarette out and looks up at him through her fringe. “You should go after her.”

“What can I say?”

“Be straight. Tell her how you feel.”

“She already knows that and she chose to go. I think that’s my answer.”

The woman with the disabled man is struggling to push his chair through the door of the brasserie. The man’s hand is caught between the chair and the doorframe and Harry sees his face flinch with pain. When his head leans back there is such profound weariness in his face. A waiter rushes forward to help the woman. She smiles thanks to the young man but the exhaustion is marked all around her eyes too. Perhaps, Harry considers, it is best for Edie’s sake that she has gone.

“You said that she left the photograph behind.”

“I’m sorry?”

“The photograph of Francis? The one that someone sent her?”

“Yes. Here. I’ll show you.”

The envelope had been there beneath the diary. It had saddened him to see Edie had left that too. Did she feel let down by them both? He recalls her fingers touching the edge of Francis’s photograph.

“Hell,” says Cassie. She turns over the photograph. “Poor man. His poor face. It’s like a cry for help, isn’t it? No wonder it spooked her.”