The paint has blistered from the ceiling and flaked down onto the staircase. It is like a sweep of confetti strewn all up the stairs, and there is a smell of damp decay. Can it really be just four years ago? The house has the air of having been abandoned for decades.

Bowen’s flashlight leads along the corridor, picking out moldering lampshades and stacks of curling magazines. It lights a birdcage, a box of crockery, and a cobwebbed wheelchair.

“This was the saloon, but it became a ward during the war,” he says as he pushes the door. “Though you perhaps already know that?”

“Yes,” Edie replies and realizes that she is holding her breath.

How odd to cross this threshold again. How shockingly alike and different it all is. She is conscious, as she stands here, of how many times she has replayed this memory, how she has stored away all its detail. The bedsteads are still here, though stripped back to their metal frames. Without the antiseptic smell and the blue uniforms, they are just boys’ beds in a dormitory. The wallpaper is coming away, sheets peeling down from the tops of the walls.

“It’s shrugging off its skin,” she says. “How sorry it looks.”

“I’m not sure that it would be terribly hygienic any longer.”

She had looked at all the men in their beds, one by one, hoping for Harry’s face, and they all looked back at her, so obviously not him. She had feared how bad the injury would be. Francis had told her that Harry had been caught in an explosion on the barbed wire and that he was pretty nastily cut up. She had looked at the men with bandaged faces and wondered if she would still know him. Edie walks the length of the room again. Just for a second it flashes into cold white daylight, with the scent of larkspur and Harry’s eyes lifting to hers.

“Your relative did make it out of here, I take it?” Mr. Bowen’s voice brings her back to the dim present.

“Yes. He’s a photographer now.”

“Grand. We are the lucky ones and must make the most of every day.”

His face is lost in the dazzle of the flashlight beam but she hears a melancholy edge in his voice. What secrets they all must now keep stored away. She looks down the corridor from the ward. “May I?”

“Of course. I’ll open a shutter for you.”

The room is just darkness at the end of the corridor. She pictures Harry in the doorway. Walking through feels oddly like some sort of rite.

“You look like someone has just stepped on your grave,” says Bowen’s voice, suddenly there at her side again. “It was a picture gallery, I think. Someone in the family was a collector.”