When the telegram had arrived at the end of October, she had somehow known what it would say. There was just something about him when he came back on leave; a recklessness, she supposed she might call it; something precarious; a sense that he had already started letting go. And yet, could she have got that wrong? She can remember so few of his words that week, but as he had readied to leave, he had said, “It will all be over in another year and then I’ll start again.” She wasn’t sure that she believed him then, as he had stood in the doorway, heading back to the station. She had doubted his conviction. But had she just misunderstood? Had she misread him? She had seen weariness on his face and read it as a reluctance to return to the war, but was it rather that his trust in her was dying? Was he giving up on her in that moment? Could he, even then, have been planning a different course? Did he really say “I” and not “we,” and if he had, was that significant?

Harry’s letters are in the same box. She doesn’t mean to reread them, but even the appearance of his writing on the page is so different from Francis’s letters. Harry had so many more words. He had spoken to her in his letters, while after Will’s death Francis had always seemed to just be repeating a script. At the top of the pile, Harry’s P.S. thanks her for pencils. I can see where you have sharpened them with a knife. I can picture you on the kitchen step with the paring knife. It will break my heart when I have to sharpen them again. And that was just how they were together, Harry and her. It had always been like that, and neither of them would have really let it spill over into anything that they needed to feel guilty about. Neither of them would have hurt Francis. They never even needed to speak about bridges that mustn’t be crossed; it was just understood that there was a limit. But, of course, she realizes now that Francis was watching. Of course he was listening to them. Of course he didn’t understand that there was a limit. How far did he think it had gone?