The coffee machine hisses, the woman at the next table laughs, and Edie looks up. The café doubles in the mirror behind the counter and the men on the barstools watch themselves as they drink. The bottles on the bar shelves contain liquids of strange, exotic colors and they glimmer like rubies and emeralds as the evening sun slants in. A string of Allied flags droops above and looks like a forgotten Christmas decoration. The room smells of garlic and beeswax polish. She wonders if she would still know the scent of her husband’s clothes.

The buildings in the background of the photograph do not look like peacetime, but then she has spent fourteen days walking through a town that is still all rubble and ruin. Behind Francis’s shoulders there is what looks to be the shape of a wide square, except the buildings around its edges have all been brought down. The square looks as frayed as the collar of Francis’s coat. She has stood and stared and turned and compared in every square in Arras this week.

Edie watches the waitress moving around the room, singing along to the gramophone as she weaves between the tables with plates stacked up in her arms. All of the china in this café seems to have different patterns, Edie notices. She imagines that this tumbledown town must be full of smashed-up and mixed-up crockery.

“C’était bon?” The waitress smiles as she takes Edie’s soup dish away.

“Yes. Très bon. It was very good. Thank you.”

Is it wrong that she should still notice the taste of the soup? Is it wrong that she should want someone to share that with? She imagines Francis’s face across the table. It doesn’t seem right.

Why would Francis be in Arras? How could he be? She remembers that this town was mentioned in his letters at the end of 1916. As she walks through its streets, she thinks that there are lintels and arcades and shop signs that she recognizes from his 1916 photographs. She knows that he has been here, that he has walked these same streets, but that last photograph can’t be from 1916. Could he really be here still?

She looks around the café, noticing how the wood paneling on the walls needs repainting, and the tablecloths have been laundered too many times. But the gramophone is quietly playing songs from before the war and the bread is good. There are jugs of white larkspur on each table and the smell takes her back to sitting at Harry’s hospital bedside.