She recalls the night when he broke the mirror. His eyes had fluttered when she had first walked into his room and didn’t seem to be able to focus, like he wasn’t really there, like he was seeing something else, but then his pupils had dilated and stilled as they connected with her own. He had looked like his own death mask then, as his head had rolled back on the pillow. His cheek, against her own, was as cold as a tomb and wet with her tears. She had put her unsteady fingers to his white lips and there had been no thoughts in that moment, no questions or doubts, only the need to care for him. She had watched his chest rise, and falter, and would have given him her own breath. As she switched off the light she had looked back and, lying there with his hands crossed over his chest, he was a marble soldier on a cenotaph. She had returned to her own room and, staring into the darkness, had so very nearly gone back and lain down on the bed next to Harry. How much more complicated it might all be now. Surely it is better not to have that complication?

Edie thinks of him, but tells herself that she mustn’t. She has made a decision not to be in contact with him again, knowing what those words in his diary did, knowing how close she has come to being the woman that Francis suspected she was. She can’t be with Harry and not feel like she is still proving those suspicions right. And yet she is traveling home to his mother’s house. To Harry’s house. Can she carry on living there now, surrounded by another woman’s china patterns and handed-down cake forks and family photographs? How can she live with the three of them there on the mantelpiece, knowing now what they knew? It can’t be as it was. Looking out across the rooftops of Amiens, she realizes it is already all too complicated.

Market gardens and waterways pull past. It turns again to open landscape and a young man apologizes as he takes the seat opposite. Too young to have been in poilu blue, he unrolls a magazine full of American film stars. While his thoughts might be with Rudolph Valentino and Mary Pickford, he has the hands of a farm boy, Edie decides. He places his finger to the line on the page as he glances out at the passing barns and haystacks and cattle in the shelter of the hawthorns.