It was Rose who had sent her this photograph, folded into that momentous letter. He had taken it himself eighteen months earlier, back near Béthune, he had told her. He had recently given Francis his old camera and they had been planning an outing to Ypres together. To photograph the sights, he had said in his letter. Edie thinks about the sights of Ypres. She thinks about Francis making plans for photographic excursions. Is it so improbable? Could he really have let go when he yet had plans? Should he not—could he not—still be taking photographs somewhere?

Francis’s letters are laid out across the table. Edie had realized, as she retrieved the box, that she had not read his words for a long time. It is nearly two years since she has last pulled the box of letters out from under the bed. How had she accepted it for all that time? How has she never before thought to look through them for more clues? Francis’s last letter is dated September 1917 and is brief and purposeful, just full of arrangements for his journey home and complaints about camp food. When she reads it aloud, she can’t discern what mood he is in. She can’t hear his voice there. She thinks about the man who then made that journey home, who sat silently in her house through the last week of September, and wishes that she had tried harder to get him to talk. Did he already, at that point, suspect that something had gone on between her and his brother? She thinks now that it must have been the case, but where had that suspicion started? Where had it come from? Was he watching her that week and looking for signs? Was he seeing guilt, seeing betrayal, in all her words and gestures? Was he already planning to take Harry’s diary when he got back? Did he know what he would do next?