Gabriel shrugs. The match betrays the shaking of his hands as he lights a cigarette, Harry notices. “Both? Madeleine resents my heart and blood and breath. That I have returned and he has not. I would once have given her my blood and breath. But now she tells me that I am too late.”

“Is that true? Does she not just need time?” Harry blows smoke at the pink sky.

“No. There is not time enough in my lifetime.”

“Perhaps returning isn’t the right thing,” Harry says. “Perhaps we expect too much of it? Perhaps it is better just to keep moving on? Perhaps you’re not there yet either?”

“Perhaps, perhaps,” says Gabriel, crushing his cigarette. “I don’t know that I should have returned. I don’t know that I have a place here any longer. I don’t know what I am meant to be.”

“You need to talk to her. You need to tell her that.”

Gabriel nods his head.

He writes to Edie again that night. He sends it all to her in words and images: the significance of a lantern in a window, Gabriel’s struggle to settle on the right design for the memorial, and the way that he looks at Madeleine. He sends her sketches of the gold of the hayfield, the shadows of his loft, and the shine of Madeleine’s plaits; he draws the folds of the fields, the shape of the walnut trees, and the way the sun glows on the red cliff behind the house; he gives her the streak of the bats against the blue-black sky now, and the glimmer of the ghost-winged moths. He means to let Edie travel with him. He wants her to see it all, to share it all, even though it all means nothing if she’s not here with him. He wants her to know that he would still give her his blood and his last breath.

ON THE THIRD day the hayrick comes, swaggering and creaking, precariously top-heavy. They fork the hay up into the loft from the wagon and the children trample it flat. The gold and green is pressed to the rafters and Harry’s aerie is gone. There is something bright and beautiful here, he thinks. Something timeless. Something that will go on. He thinks that, if he were Gabriel, he might stay, that he might make that effort, that he would try to make a future of it.

Gabriel helps him to clear away old straw and implements in a tumbledown cottage behind the barns. He talks of the tools and terminology of his new commission. “I do not expect to get a taste for statuary,” he says.

“And Madeleine?”