Louisa presses her lips together. “It sounds like Michael’s typewriter.”

“Really? Do you think?”

“Yes.”

“But why send me that? Why send me that without a note to explain it?”

Louisa turns her glass before she looks up. “Michael seems to have gone through a process of clearing his desk at the end. He tidied and labeled and sorted through all of his papers. He left it all as if he meant to hand it over. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that my brother’s mind was tidy at that point, but in his own way he was dotting the i and crossing the t. I guess that he meant to return it to you.”

“But why not put in a note? Not even a signature? Why not let me know that it was him sending it?”

“Perhaps he just couldn’t bring himself to write again? Perhaps he just didn’t know what to say?”

Edie thinks about Francis’s black-and-white photograph face, but it is different now, knowing the truth, knowing that he isn’t out there any longer. Something has shifted; something that she now realizes was fear and shame and overwhelming worry as to how she might cope if he did come back. She now just feels desperately sad and sorry for the broken man in the photograph.

“May I ask what the photograph looks like?”

Edie takes a mouthful of her drink. It’s been six weeks now since she last saw that picture, and she doesn’t like to bring it to mind. “He’s standing in a square, but it’s all broken down. He doesn’t look well—tired, exhausted, like he’s given up. He seems so much older in the photograph—like he’s ten years older than actually he is.”

“He looks like he’s taking the photograph of himself, doesn’t he?” Louisa asks. “Isn’t that right? You can see that from the angle of his arms. I think it was taken in Ypres, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. But how on earth can you know that?”

“I might have seen that photograph before. I think I might have seen it on Michael’s desk. Only it’s quite memorable. Once you’ve looked at that poor man’s face, it’s difficult to forget it, isn’t it?”

“It is.”

“I’m sorry. I probably shouldn’t say that, should I?”

Edie shakes her head. “But how did your brother come to have it?”

“I suppose because they took photographs together? Because they developed them together? Didn’t you say that Michael sent you a package of Francis’s photographs after he died? That he’d developed Francis’s last film?”

“He did. But why keep that one?”

“A memento?”