Edie surveys the garden and listens to the low sultry hum of the bees. It is overgrown now; poppies have seeded and bindweed twines through the buddleias. In 1917 Mrs. Blythe had helped her dig up the lawn and they had put in lines of potatoes and cabbages and carrots. How has it run rank around her? How has she not noticed the weeds taking it back? She tells herself that she should make the effort again and reverse this neglect. She silently recites notions of efficiency and self-sufficiency; she will make a bonfire and dig the earth over. She will cut back the buddleia and take pruning shears to the overgrown roses. She must plan ahead for next spring. Order seeds. Draw up a scheme. Bring back the lupines and the broad beans and the Canterbury bells. It is healthy to make practical plans, she tells herself. And yet, as she schemes potato trenches and lines of spring greens, she is struck by a sudden sense of alienation. This garden now belongs to Harry. This is his house. Can it still be her home? How can she still plan a future here?

There is a pair of men’s boots in the border, she notices. The leather is lichened green and moss has claimed the soles. She vaguely recalls them being there, but is no longer sure which brother they belong to. The larkspur has seeded itself around the boots, is still there in the same border where it always grew. Mrs. Blythe had told her that larkspur signified fickleness in the language of flowers. The smell of it takes Edie back to a hospital ward and a café in Arras where Francis’s face is waiting on a wall of missing men. Had these all been acts of fickleness?

She washes her hands at the kitchen sink. The earth swills and circles away and she remembers washing Harry’s hands in the Ypres hotel room. The glass might well have been in her own hand, for all the pain it gave her. She had felt such tenderness toward his cut skin in that instant. She leans against the draining board and looks at his letters on the kitchen table.

They had been waiting for her behind the door when she got back. She had put the suitcase down in the hall, turned the card in her hands, and taken his envelopes through to the kitchen. The postcard was a picture of Amiens Cathedral surrounded by sandbags. She had passed it on the train just hours earlier. He wrote from the station as he waited for a train to take him south. Had they passed so close again, then?