They watch a steamer pulling out from the jetty. Smoke billows behind. Edie looks down at her damp feet and considers whether to make the crossing. The wind whips her hair at her face and she tastes salt on her lips. Gulls hang and cry above. Does moving on mean heading north or south? In which direction is she meant to look forward? Can she leave Harry on this side of the Channel, condemned to never move on, always lingering in these memories? But, after everything that has happened, after all the mess and hurt that they’ve caused, she knows that their paths have to part here.

“Yes. My boat is at five.”

Clara squeezes Edie’s arm. “Don’t look back,” she says.

Chapter Fifty-Six: Harry

Chapter Fifty-Six

Harry

Amiens, September 1921

THE DAWN IS FULL OF BIRDSONG. IT FEELS LIKE SOMETHING NEWLY made, something that hope might be invested in. Except Harry is feeling short on hope. He tosses a coin at the station and, with his decision thus determined, he trades it for a postcard. He tells Edie that he is going south and copies out the address that Gabriel gave him. Beyond that he is unsure of what more to say. Harry doesn’t know what exists in Saint-Christophe du Quercy, but he has a hunch that it might not be a happy discovery. Ralph’s note had concluded by giving him the same advice again: that if Francis was killed, he’s likely to be one of the nameless burials at Tyne Cot. And if he is not? If Francis is in Saint-Christophe du Quercy, if that really is a possibility, why has he chosen to let Edie believe that he is dead all this time? And why is he reminding her of his existence now? Will she return home to further envelopes?

The train is packed. At length he manages to find a seat, but is crushed between an overweight widow and an amputee. While he is packed in such close proximity, Harry’s eyes cannot help but be drawn to the hemmed edge of the steel-blue trousers to his right. He stares down at his own hand, the scar white across his palm. Edie had once, years earlier, shown him which crease was supposedly his life line. He had been reminded of that on the day he was discharged from the hospital, the ward sister jokingly advising him to henceforth steer clear of gypsy fortune-tellers. He can still hear the woman’s singsong Dublin accent and see the wink of a dark eye. His life line is cut straight across. Is this, then, the start of the second part? He thinks of Edie’s fingers tracing the line. Those same fingers touching Francis’s photograph. He is not sure that he has much enthusiasm for the second act if she is not a player in it.