The envelope has crumpled in her hand, but she needs to check inside it. There must be more than just that picture. There must be an explanation. A meaning. But there is nothing else there. No letter. Not a sentence. Not one word. She turns the envelope over and sees her address has been typed by a machine with worn keys. The curve of the u is broken, the dot on the i is missing, but the inky perforation of the full stop is emphatic. She can’t read the smudged postmark. There are hyphens in the chain of letters, she makes out, and it is perhaps a Saint-Something-or-Other, but the blur is like a divine mystery. Her hands leave damp fingerprints on the brown paper. She has grown to accept that there must be a full stop after Francis’s name, but could she have got that wrong? Could there really be a chance? It is strange to see her own fingers tremble like that.

She rocks onto her side and feels the cold of the floor against her cheek. The photograph is there, just inches from her hand. She hears footsteps going up the pavement outside, the buddleia tapping against the sitting-room window in the breeze, the beat of a waltz on Mrs. Wilson’s gramophone next door, but mostly there is the noise of her own breathing. She shouldn’t be here, lying on the hall floor on a Tuesday morning, with her face pressed down against linoleum that needs mopping, but how hard it is to make herself move. Why is it so difficult to stretch her hand out toward the photograph? To believe that it really is him?

The sun is slanting through the fanlight now, and the harlequin colors of the glass are elongating across the tiles, jeweling his face in red and green and gold. The face of her husband, who has been missing for the past four years.

Chapter One: Harry

Chapter One

Harry

The Folkestone-Boulogne ferry, August 1921

EDIE?”

Harry sees her as he steps out onto the deck. She is wearing a gray silk dress, and though her hair is hidden under a broad-brimmed straw hat, he knows her from the shape of her wrist on the railings and the way that she holds a cigarette.

“It is you?”

But when she turns, it isn’t Edie at all.

“Pardon?” The woman takes her sun hat off as she looks up at Harry. Dark hair flickers around a pale face. “Forgive me, do I know you?”

“I’m terribly sorry. I was mistaken. Just for an instant I was certain that you were somebody else.” He nods an apology and steps back. How could he have thought it? He wants to walk away quickly now, to turn his face from the woman who is not her. He suddenly feels breathless and unsteady, but he hesitates when he sees the woman’s eyes. “Are you quite all right, miss?”