“Don’t apologize. Don’t ever apologize. You have every reason to cry, and better out than in, eh? Shall I fetch the bottle of brandy?”

“Your brother wrote to me twice, you know,” she tells Louisa as Louisa fills the glasses. “He sent me a letter in November 1917 and told me that Francis was missing and believed killed, and I was grateful to him for that, the fact that he’d taken the time, and that he said such kind things. But then afterward, I heard that your brother had brought Francis back to the dressing station, that he’d carried him back there himself. I haven’t been able to make that fit, that Francis could have both been missing and a casualty.”

“This is the dressing station at Houthulst Forest, I’m assuming?”

“Yes.”

Louisa shakes her head. “Lots of men disappeared from that dressing station. I know that much. It was only a group of pillboxes, you see, just concrete bunkers, and the enemy kept on shelling it. Men got brought back there, brought back to what they hoped might be safety, only to be lost all over again. Michael had nightmares about that place, but he kept going back over that area. He had to keep going back there. A lot of the names on his list were connected with that dressing station.”

“But why did he not tell me that he’d made the effort to bring Francis back? Had I known that, had I known that he’d tried, I would have thanked him.”

“Because in the end he couldn’t save your husband? Because he felt that he’d tried and failed?”

Edie looks at the young man smiling over the fireplace, imagines the weight of Francis’s body on that young man’s back, and all the effort that must have taken, only for it all to have been for nothing. She is not sure who she feels sorrier for.

“You said that my brother wrote to you twice?”

“Yes, he sent me a package full of Francis’s photographs just a few weeks after his first letter. Mostly the photographs that they’d taken together. It was kind of him. I was glad to have them.” She thinks about the other photograph, the final one that had come through her door in May. If Francis himself hadn’t sent it, could it be that Michael Rose had contacted her a third time?

“I WAS SENT a photograph a few months ago—a photograph of my husband. It came in the post, but there was nothing else in the envelope. No letter. No details as to the sender. I somehow seem to have spent the past few months convincing myself that Francis sent it himself.”

“Where was it posted from?” Louisa asks.

“From France.”

“What did the envelope look like?”

“It was a manila envelope, a typed address, worn keys. Is it possible your brother could have sent it?”